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THE REASON OF 
SUFFERING 




FRANCIS E. TOWER, D.D, 



THE REASON OF 
SUFFERING 

AND KINDRED THEMES 

BY 

FRANCIS E. TOWER, D.D. 

Author of 

The Advancing Kingdom, 
Whafs the Trouble, etc. 




Boston, Mass. 

THE C. M. CLARK PUBLISHING CO, 

1910 



^$> 



Copyright, 1910 

The C. M. Clark Publishing Company 

Boston, Massachusetts 



CCI.A280719 



CONTENTS 



I The Price of Progress . . . . 


1 


II The Splendor of Self-Sacrifice 


15 


III The Universal Cross . . . 


27 


IV The Multiplied Crosses . . . . 


50 


Y The Many-Sided Atonement 


59 


VI Eternal Retributions According to 




Righteousness .... 


71 


VII Elements of a True Manhood 


. 106 


VIII Paul; an Exemplar of True Manhood 


. 129 


IX The Kingliness of Truth 


. 145 


X Piety and Prosperity 


. 158 


XI Faith and Works .... 


. 183 


XII Divine and Human Agency . 


. 203 


XIII Perils of the Censorious Temper . 


. 217 


^ XIV Personal Influence 


. 236 


XV Revivals 


. 253 


XVI Opportunity 


. 271 


XVII Good Hope . . . . . 


. 282 


r XVIII Death 


. 297 


XIX Future Rewards . . . ' . 


. 313 


XX The First Easter .... 


. 324 



INTRODUCTORY. 

Those who suffer rarely fail to ask *' Why? 
What is the place which this element of expe- 
rience is designed to fill in the plan of the 
universe? What is the reason of suffering?" 

Glimpses of an answer will be found in 
the leading sections of this book. Suffer- 
ing is manifestly the price of progress, and it 
is plainly involved in self-sacrifice; it is also 
inseparable from the thought of the Cross, 
and of vicarious atonement and eternal ret- 
ributions ; the greatest and best of men have 
often been the greatest sufferers; and with- 
out this element manhood would seem to 
lack something of its manliness. 

The first eight sections of this book are 
thus suggestive directly in the line of its title ; 
some of the others are so to a less extent in- 
directly ; the few remaining, it is hoped, may 
stand excused because of the importance of 
the themes of which they treat. 

The essay form is prominent ; yet several of 
them were originally prepared for pulpit use. 
This is true of the last, though in the unusual 
guise of verse, and was actually delivered 
on an Easter Sunday. 

In quoting from Scripture, the writer has 

Hi 



Introductory 

occasionally varied from the King James ver- 
sion by translating directly from the original. 
In these days of many versions it is hoped 
that this will not be thought an unwarrantable 
liberty, especially as the proper force of the 
revelation could only be brought out in this 
way. 

In the section on Death, the thought is 
expressed that in an ideal or fully perfected 
state it may become possible to exchange 
worlds without death. If this seems start- 
ling to the reader let him ponder the following 
paragraph from the Biblical Review for March, 
1908. 

'' When man reaches the degree of unfold- 
ment and development that gives him power 
over his own physical existence, then death 
w^ill pass away ; and in place of man's forsak- 
ing the body to return to dust, the body will 
be gradually transmuted and refined by the 
unfolding of the spiritual consciousness, until 
all its elements are gradually changed into 
spirit-elements — a spiritual body, over which 
death has no power." 

That this and other unfamiliar ideas may 
receive the candid consideration of the reader 
is the timid hope of 

The Author. 



w 



The Reason of Suffering 

I. 

THE PRICE OF PROGRESS 

The ways of God are full of surprises ; and 
nowhere more so than in the methods and 
processes arranged for our moral training 
and growth. 

Naturally we love pleasure and shrink 
from pain. At the threshold of life we pic- 
ture the future as a pathway tufted with 
verdure, gemmed with flowers, and stretch- 
ing on through summer fields. When expe- 
rience begins to show us that it is really a 
highway paved with dust and stones and 
hedged in by thorns, we are filled with con- 
fusion, and are loath to accept the fact. We 
try to disprove it. We struggle vainly to 
change it. Many a wayfarer goes on hoping 
to the last that the next step will bring the 
wished-for change, and drops into the great 
unseen still unawakened to the deepest real- 
ity of the life he has lived. Yet this lesson 
is plainly written on the face of all things 
about us. 

We lift up our eyes to the " golden lamps '* 
of the sky, and admire their perfect order, 
their stately march, their radiant beauty. 

1 



The Reason of Suffering 

But how have they reached this state of com- 
parative perfection? God might, we must 
suppose, have set them in it at the outset by 
the fiat of His omnipotence, just as easily as 
He created the substance out of which they 
were made. But how did He do it ? Take 
the telescope of science and look back across 
the abyss of the cosmic ages, and lo, those 
orbs are gone, and the whole universe is one 
vast, terrific vortex of burning Stardust ! 
Out of this fiery womb the worlds were 
born, and that amid throes of convulsion 
such as awe the thought and overwhelm the 
imagination. 

Between that primal birth hour and the 
present lie inconceivable cycles of aeons each 
one marked by the most violent transfor- 
mations. What has happened we know in 
part by what geology teaches us concerning 
the planet on which our lot has been cast. 
It has been moulded by no tender handling. 
The forces employed have been the most vio- 
lent in nature. Sometimes it has melted in 
seas of fire. Again it has lain frozen for 
ages in continents of ice. Now oceans have 
rolled over it in successive tides; or driven 
off from its hissing surface in atmospheres 
of steam have descended again in plunging 
torrents. Anon, electric forces have split 
open and upheaved its crumbling crust, and 

2 



The Price of Progress 

mountain dashed against mountain has ground 
to powder its flintiest rocks. 

All this (we are told) was necessary before 
its substance could be properly compounded 
and its soil prepared for its intended use. 
No iron heated at the forge and hammered 
on the anvil was ever more forcibly wrought 
than was this earth of ours at God's forge 
and anvil in the geologic ages. 

We gaze upon it now in its advanced 
stage, and dreams of beauty lift the soul. 
When, however, we look back and examine 
the process and see it staggering forward to 
its present condition through mounting cycles 
of mighty catastrophes, swept by storms, 
torn by floods, smitten by lightnings, scarred 
by explosions, rent by upheavals, rasped by 
floating mountains of ice, frozen for ages in 
the embrace of glaciers, or melted in burning 
floods of outbursting fires, we begin to see 
the meaning of Paul's pregnant assertion 
that ** the whole creation groaneth and trav- 
aileth in pain together until now," and we 
seem to hear the voice of nature proclaiming 
that suffering is the price of progress. 

We are led to the same impression also 
when we study the facts of natural life. It 
is a wonderful emanation from the bosom of 
God, this life of ours, and from its earliest 
appearance on our planet it exhibits a regular 

3 



The Reason of Suffering, 

ascent from the feeblest beginnings up through 
multiplied forms more and more highly 
wrought until the culmination is reached in 
the physical man. 

How, then, has this advance been made? 
What a spectacle does the living world pre- 
sent ! 

In the first place every life begins in a 
scene of agony. Then come the pangs of 
hunger and kindred wants driving the whole 
animal nature to intense and unremitting ex- 
ertions. Then comes the strife with nature; 
cold and heat, storm and flood and deadly 
exhalations, sweeping off vast multitudes at 
every stage of growth, till the number that 
remains seems as but the handful of sur- 
vivors from a foundered vessel. Then comes 
the conflict between the different orders ; the 
strong crowding out the weak, and the fierce 
devouring the inoffensive, till between the 
deadly attack and the desperate defence, the 
whole earth is turned into a camp of enemies, 
where, so far as the lower orders are con- 
cerned, the rule, to which there are few ex- 
ceptions, is death by violence and slaughter ! 

This is the ordeal through which life for 
countless years has been toiling upward. 
This is that " struggle for existence " which 
scientists have recently held up as the sole 
sufficient explanation of the present condition 

4 



The Price op Progress 

of life on the globe. Birth-pangs, hunger- 
pangs, poison-pangs, death-pangs: these are 
the inexorable conditions of its existence and 
progress. Here it is evident that suffering is 
the price of progress. 

Let us take a third view and look at the 
progress of society. 

That there has been advance toward a 
perfect standard, although such a standard 
has not yet been reached, is a visible fact. 
But what has this progress cost? Count 
up the battlefields. Number the slain on 
arenas of blood where right has contended 
with wrong. Make out the roll of ** the noble 
army of martyrs." Enumerate the lives 
which earth's most noble souls have laid down 
as a holocaust upon the altars of freedom, 
truth and justice. Measure the tears that 
have fallen from the eyes of the wronged and 
oppressed, whose silent protest has stirred 
the undercurrents of society far more power- 
fully than any eloquence of tongue or pen. 
Estimate, if you can, the force of the heart- 
throbs that have gone up to God in groans 
and sighs and vocal prayers, opening secret 
reservoirs of power before which hoary tyran- 
nies have gone down in earthquakes of rev- 
olution and blood. All these shall be only 
the titles, as it were, of those successive Iliads 
of woe which make up the history of human 

5 



The Reason of Suffering 

progress. The forces that urge it onward are 
such as can act only through strain, conflict, 
anguish. 

Israel, as a nation, was specially trained 
and set forward in the race. By what special 
means? Egyptian bondage; scourgings in 
the desert ; the rigors of the law ; persecution 
by heathen foes; captivities in Assyria and 
Babylon ! 

France in modem times has risen up re- 
generated, but at the mention of her name 
there rises before us the reign of terror ; Paris 
drenched in the gore of her noblest sons; a 
guiltless monarch led away to the scaffold; 
and war's wild thunders rolling for twenty 
bloody years over prostrate Europe. Here 
in impressive form we see proof that suffering 
is the price of progress. 

It is also quite to our purpose to note that 
the human intellect reaches its full power and 
efficiency by no easy path. It does so only 
under stimuli that put the faculties to many 
an agonizing strain. 

It is no secret that they who delve deep 
in the mines of knowledge must bum the 
midnight oil. Just as little is it a secret that 
every really great achievement in this field 
comes as the culmination of a series of efforts 
that have absorbed if not exhausted the life- 
energies. Every new problem solved is the 

6 



The Price of Progress 

trophy of sore intellectual strife. Every 
fresh truth wrenched from the unknown is 
won by powers strained up to no ordinary 
tension. The labors of Hercules are but 
shadows to the toils by which mind achieves 
its successes. 

We reap the fruit, and forget the cost. 
Those who have made epochs by the toil of 
their brain have generally been sacrifices 
upon the altar of their purpose. The science 
that instructs us, the art that delights us, the 
poems that move us, do so because into them 
have been poured the living energies of ardent 
souls. The best works in these fields have 
been by men who were consumed by the fire 
of their zeal, and who coined their life-blood 
drop by drop. Columbus toiled twenty years 
to realize his thought, and he died broken- 
hearted. Milton studied and wrote himself 
blind. Newton wrecked his mighty intellect 
at forty-five. Cowper's best poems were 
written between paroxysms of mental anguish 
that seemed like insanity. The pages of 
Mrs. Browning's poems were almost literally 
drenched with her tears. What nobler souls 
than these have appeared on our planet ? 

Surely, however it may be with medioc- 
rity, with the highest range of intellectual 
achievement the law is inexorable: Suffering 
is the price of progress. 

7 



The Reason op Suffering 

It ought not to surprise us then that we 
find the same law in force, in the matter of 
moral growth, even in the case of the stainless 
Jesus. Mere sinlessness is not perfection. 
Adam was sinless in Paradise, but not perfect, 
else had he never sinned. The various ele- 
ments of moral perfection were present in- 
deed, but only as germs. Growth was neces- 
sary ; some means of discipline or training had 
to be applied. 

Innocence is not holiness in the full sense. 
Innocence is temptable and may be subverted. 
Holiness is above the reach of allurement 
and established in invincible strength. In- 
nocence is the germ, holiness the fruit. The 
former must grow into the latter. Inno- 
cence is the starting point, holiness the goal ; 
but between the two lie the risk and trial of 
the race. 

Christ in his earthly career was always 
innocent, but temptable, and '' tempted in 
all points like as we are." Christ after his 
resurrection wore a victor's crown; and that 
crown was something far more glorious than 
gems and stars, even moral perfection — ^holi- 
ness in its full stature and immutable strength, 
the radiant bloom of a perfected moral and 
spiritual manhood. That he reached this su- 
preme exaltation by a corresponding depth of 
trial was simply the necessity that is upon us all. 

8 



The Price op Progress 

The moral faculties, like all the others, 
must grow by exercise; and the moment we 
name them, it becomes evident that their 
very nature is such that they can find vigorous 
exercise only under conditions of trial. What 
elements of a high moral character shall we 
instance? 

Is fidelity that cannot be shaken the 
comer-stone thereof? What can exercise it 
but some strong adverse influence? Fidelity 
that has never cost anything is at best in the 
crude state. It is certainly unproved and 
possibly non-existent. 

Is moral courage an important element? 
Where can it find an opportunity but amid 
the perils and the shock of actual conflict? 

Is fortitude, patience, a fundamental qual- 
ity ? The word itself points it out as one 
active chiefly in enduring, in bearing; which 
again is precisely the root meaning of the 
word *' suffering." 

Is love, in its broadest sense, the crown and 
glory of all? Who does not know that love 
grows by self-sacrifice, feeds upon it, demands 
it as the only adequate expression, and flames 
up in its most exuberant joy when its (volun- 
tary) suffering for its object is most severe? 

Verily, as well might we expect framed 
buildings without the tearing of saws and 
planes, polished statues without the sound 

9 



The Reason of Suffering 

of chisel and hammer, bright, glowing metals 
without the fury of the furnace fire, as to 
expect high moral qualities without the 
discipline of pain. It belongs to the very 
nature of the process by which they are un- 
folded. 

** Goodness," it has been boldly said, 
*' seems to be under the doom of suffering " ; 
and as to its full growth and perfection this 
certainly is undeniable. It is even a neces- 
sity that reaches up to the Godhead. How 
does God *' commend " (express, or exercise 
in the highest form) His love toward us? It 
is a trite remark to say that it is by the giving 
up of His own son in an ordeal of terrific 
suffering. Not quite so trite, perhaps, is the 
yet obvious reflection that only in this way 
could His love find its highest exhibition and 
exercise. Divine goodness: divine suffering: 
these twain are linked in history only because 
they were already united by an inner and 
eternal necessity. 

This is indeed a mystery; but it is a gra- 
cious one, standing as the related and anti- 
dotal counterpart of that other gloomiest of 
all mysteries, the existence of evil. Let us 
not vainly seek to solve these mysteries ; but 
let us not, on the other hand, fail to learn the 
lesson which they teach. Mother-love is 
the holiest thing on earth, and the brightest 

10 



The Price of Progress 

type of love divine. It is no accident that 
its first throb begins in a supreme agony, but 
the herald of a law high-reaching as the throne 
of God, and broad in its application as the 
universe of being. 

Experience is an eloquent witness here. 
Wherever in history high moral attainments 
have been reached, they have always been 
seen emerging from an ordeal of pain. 

Is it of faith that we seek a high type? 
Then must we think of Abraham — ^and of 
that lonely mountain summit where a father, 
with unutterable anguish, gives up a son 
to anticipated death ! Abraham's faith be- 
came great by a great agony. 

Is it of meekness that we enquire? Its 
example is Moses, whose soul for forty years 
was vexed by the sin and ingratitude of his 
people, and once on the mount of inter- 
cession, bowed in an anguish that courted 
death; Moses' meekness, humility, self-for- 
getfulness (for such is the force of the Hebrew 
word) became great by the greatness of his 
trial. 

Do we think of fortitude? Daniel on his 
knees by the open window, expecting as a 
consequence to be torn by the hungry lions, 
is the example we want. His steadfastness 
became great by the severity of its test. 

Is it zeal of which we seek an eminent 

11 



The Reason op Suffering 

t5^e? Who possessed it in larger measure 
than the mighty prophet who, when all others 
were found wanting, was *' very jealous " for 
the Lord God of Hosts? Yet the great Elijah, 
at the culmination of his career, lay down 
under a juniper tree and prayed to die ! The 
flame of his zeal burned high only because it 
was fanned by the strong winds of adversity. 

Is patience the subject of our investiga- 
tions? We have heard of it in Job; and we 
have also heard of the means by which it 
was matured. The loss of property, wife, 
children, health, reputation, all but a bare 
existence, was a crushing reality not poetry 
to the suffering patriarch. His world-re- 
nowned patience was the outcome of his 
unparalleled trials. 

Is love, unselfish and holy, the thing for 
which we search? It breathes in the Psalm- 
ist's impassioned strain: '' If I forget thee, 
O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her 
cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my 
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I 
prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.'* 
But he was speaking in the name of the cap- 
tives who hung their harps upon the willows, 
and sat down by the streams of conquering 
Babylon and '' wept when they remembered 
Zion." Their love was tested and purified in 
the fires of a great affliction, 

12 



The Price of Progress 

Is it a trial to the young eaglets when the 
mother bird tears in pieces their nest on the 
brow of the mountain cliff and leaves them 
only the alternative of flying with their un- 
used wings or being dashed in pieces on the 
rocks below? Doubtless it is, but otherwise 
their wings unused would fail of strength and 
they would never fly at all. And God has in- 
structed us that " as the eagle stirreth up her 
nest," so he finds it necessary to dislodge his 
children from their resting places of ease, and 
put them under the stress of trial and suffering, 
to rouse them to begin a heavenward flight. 
** For whom the Lord lovethHe chasteneth, 
and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth." 

" Every son ": not even the divine Son 
could escape this law. For though he was 
a son in an ineffable sense, yet '' learned he 
obedience by the things that he suffered." 
** For it became Him for whom are all things, 
and by whom are all things, in bringing many 
sons unto glory (in purifying and lifting them 
up, and fitting them for an eternal heaven) 
to make the captain of their salvation (how 
much more themselves) perfect through suf- 
ferings." 

" Shrink not from suffering; each blow 
From which thy smitten spirit bleeds 
Is but a messenger to show 
The renovation which it needs. 

13 



The Reason of Suffering 

" The earthly sculptor smites the rock; 
Loud the relentless hammer rings: 
And from that rude unshapen block 
At length imprisoned beauty springs. 

** Thou art that rude unshapen stone, 
And waitest till the arm of strife 
Shall make its crucifixion known, 
And smite and carve thee into life. 

"The heavenly sculptor works on thee; 
Be patient; soon his arm of might 
Shall from thy prison's darkness free 
And change thee to a form of light." 



14 



II. 

THE SPLENDOR OF SELF-SACRIFICE 

What is the life principle which is in- 
culcated upon us in the passage where the 
apostle says, '' Let this mind be in you which 
was also in Christ Jesus "? (Phil. 2:5.) The 
context answers; and it may be paraphrased 
thus: '' Who being in the form (or condition) 
of God, thought not his equality with God a 
thing to be selfishly clung to (as a robber clings 
to his prey) but divested himself of it, and 
took the form (or condition) of a servant, and 
was made in the likeness of men; being 
determined not to have heaven itself save as 
he should make it possible for his brethren 
of our race to share it with him. And being 
found in fashion as a man he humbled him- 
self yet further, and for our sakes, became 
obedient unto death, even the agonizing and 
shameful death of the cross. Wherefore God, 
designing to show the supreme glory of this 
sublime act of self-sacrifice, has highly ex- 
alted him and given him a name that is above 
every name ; that at the name of Jesus every 
knee should bow, of beings in heaven, and 

15 



The Reason op Suffering 

beings in earth, and beings under the earth; 
and that every tongue should confess that 
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the 
Father." 

Plainly self-sacrifice is the principle here 
enjoined, and the glory to which it leads is 
presented as the motive for its adoption on 
our part. 

Certainly it is a lofty principle, and one 
belonging exclusively to the Christian system ; 
and, in fact, standing forth as the peculiar 
and distinctive feature of that system. The 
world knows nothing of it, and has no maxims 
which enjoin it. It rather enjoins exactly the 
opposite principle, for it believes in self- 
seeking, and advises every man to look out first 
of all for himself. It is far from advising 
the outpouring of self in vicarious service. 

Sages and philosophers of the past have 
failed to rise to the level of this principle. 
They have never brought it forward as the 
true rule of life. Socrates taught virtue as 
he understood it ; but not a word in his say- 
ings leads us to think that he ever conceived 
of such a high form of it as this. Plato and 
Aristotle do no better; nor do Cicero, Seneca 
and the Stoics. What they call virtue is 
well enough in its way, but it moves in a 
sphere far below the principle of the cross, 
which has been missed even by founders of 

16 



The Splendor of Self-vSacrifice 

religions. Confucius is rightly praised be- 
cause he advised that no one should do to 
his neighbor what he would not wish his 
neighbor to do to him. Yet how immeasur- 
ably does this mere negative precept fall 
below the sublime principle that brought 
Christ out of heaven to die for the world ! 
If Confucius fails, it will be waste of time to 
mention any other pagan, for it will hardly be 
claimed that any other excelled him as an 
ethical teacher. 

What must seem still more surprising 
is the fact that even Judaism falls short of 
this great law. Search the Old Testament 
through and through and never shall you find 
it expressly enjoined. Implied it may be, 
and certainly is in type and symbol. Here 
and there in the lives of the patriarchs it 
shines out for an instant in the form of im- 
pulse in some great act of self-forgetful 
service; but never do they show any con- 
sciousness of an obligation to make this prin- 
ciple the avowed and sovereign rule of their 
whole life and action. 

Jesus Christ, the son of the Highest, rose 
to a level far above patriarch, psalmist and 
prophet, as well as above all the world's 
sages, when he sublimely resolved to make 
his whole life a sacrifice, and to teach his 
disciples to walk in his steps. Self-sacrifice 

17 



The Reason of Suffering 

is the Christian principle. It is that which 
distinguishes Christianity from all other re- 
ligions, even from Judaism itself. As an 
avowed law of life it was wholly unknown till 
the Son of God revealed, exemplified and 
glorified it together by the humiliation of the 
cross. 

That it is the source of all true glory 
furnishes the motive for its adoption. 

Very different is the world's opinion. It 
looks for glory as the prize of selfish endeavor ; 
and deems that man exalted, who by cunning, 
force or fraud, can " get the better " of his 
fellows, and force them to pay him tribute 
of service or admiration. ** Seek your own 
interest; push your own fortune; grasp the 
wreath of fame ; clutch the scepter of power " ; 
such is its dictate. Ages ago the inspired 
writer observed this fact and wrote: *' Men 
will praise thee when thou doest good to thy- 
self " — ^and it is true the whole world over. 

The worldly spirit is essentially a self- 
seeking spirit. It deems itself exalted when 
it has grasped a little more of private emolu- 
ment than falls to the common lot. It thinks 
itself glorified when it has compelled men to 
lay sacrifices upon the altar of its selfish 
desires. That there is any exaltation in re- 
versing the order and abjuring those desires 
for the weal of men ; in laying oneself upon the 

18 



The Splendor of Self-Sacrifice 

altar of unselfish toil for the good of others — 
in a word that there is any glory in self- 
sacrifice — ^the worldly mind does not under- 
stand and is slow to believe. 

Yet nothing is plainer. It is a truth 
written on the face of everything about us. 
God has so ordered it that in every depart- 
ment of His universe the path to true glory 
should lie through the giving up of self in 
some form of sacrifice. 

If we turn our eyes on the material world, 
little as we might think it, we find this truth 
foreshadowed in no doubtful manner. Even 
here in the realm of matter, nothing is glorious 
that does not first pour itself out in some form 
of sacrifice and self -relinquishment. 

The sun would have no glory if it did not 
shine ; and it would not shine if it did not bum. 
All its use and splendor spring directly from a 
self -consuming, self -de voting process. The 
beams that glorify it are the fires that con- 
sume it. Every ray that crosses the void 
is an expenditure of its substance. It gives 
forth light and heat only by giving itself forth 
in a fiery dissolution. It wraps itself in 
flames as in sacrificial fires, and a whole com- 
pany of worlds rejoice in the light, and ad- 
mire the glory of the burning holocaust. It 
holds its high place as center of a system, 
monarch of a kingdom, fountain of life to 

19 



The Reason of Suffering 

uncounted myriads, solely by giving itself 
up in a typical self-sacrifice. 

The earth, in like manner, would have no 
beauty did it hold fast to all its elements, as 
the miser holds his gold. Were such a shad- 
owed selfishness the law of its existence no 
form of life would have place upon it, and it 
would be covered only with the bare and 
blackened crust of volcanic rock, a desert 
world. Something of itself it must give up 
or be content with deformity. But it does 
this, and is changed. To the nimble forces of 
life it yields up its elements, and its ugliness 
is transformed. The vegetable kingdom is 
wrought out of its surrendered substance, 
and the desert blossoms, the mountains are 
crowned, and the whole earth is robed in 
beauty. 

On every side of us we find the same law 
in force. The plant must give itself forth in 
bud and leaf, that it may be clothed in verdure 
and bloom. The pastures must yield up 
their herbage that they may be crowned with 
flocks. The tree must yield its seed that the 
birds may carol in its branches. Throughout 
the realm of material things, organic and 
inorganic, living or without life, there is no 
exaltation but through self-sacrifice; no ob- 
ject is glorious but through some form of 
self -relinquishment. Nature with a thousand 

20 



The Splendor of Self-Sacrifice 

tongues is hourly repeating in our ears that 
the path of self-sacnfice is the path of true 
glory. 

If we turn from nature to the higher field 
of human experience, we shall find the same 
truth amply illustrated. Such are the laws 
which God has established in society that all 
real glory, all true and lasting fame among 
men, is the purchase of sacrifice and self -re- 
linquishment. Spite of the disturbances of 
evil, and the false opinion of this world's 
votaries, it is still true in the long run that no 
one can be truly exalted in the esteem of men 
save by some form of self-sacrifice, voluntary 
or involuntary. 

No doubt this assertion may at first sound 
rash. It might seem at the first thought as 
if the Caesars and Bonapartes, the Homers 
and Virgils, the Platos and Aristotles, the 
conquerors, bards, and sages of the world, 
who strove for immortality, could hardly 
come under this law. It would almost seem, 
at first view, as if some of them, at least, did 
succeed in extorting from men a tribute of 
praise for which no price had been paid, and 
made their way to the throne of earthly glory 
by mere selfish endeavor. A deeper view, 
however, will correct the mistake, and show 
us that whatever real and lasting fame men 
have finally accorded them has its root in 

21 



The Reason of Suffering 

some form of sacrifice, real if not voluntary. 
For if we enquire for the ground on which a 
good fame rests, in no instance will it be found 
to rest on what a man did for himself merely, 
but in every instance on what he did, or was 
thought to have done for his fellowmen. 

Was he a conqueror? He founded an 
empire, saved a nation, freed a people, re- 
dressed old wrong, or led a race to a higher 
level of order and well-being. Under the 
providence of God, whether He meant it or 
not, His energy,His life,Himself, was expended, 
devoted, poured out, for the weal of His fel- 
lows, and on this fact, and not at all on what 
He did for Himself, rests the verdict of fame. 

Was he a sage, an artist, a poet? How 
very plain it is that in opening to the human 
mind new realms of truth, or in presenting to 
it higher ideals of beauty and excellence, in 
the marble, on the canvas, in the forms of 
speech, which should arouse, discipline, refine 
the souls of men, and wake them to a higher 
life through all coming time — how plain it is 
that in giving themselves to such works as 
these they did, in fact, though they meant it 
not, give themselves to the race. For whom 
was the life-long strife, the sacrifice of ease, 
of health, of pleasure, the mighty toil, the 
agony of effort by which they wrought so 
well? Who reaped the benefit? Not them- 

22 



The Splendor of Self-Sacrifice 

selves, but the world. They toiled for others. 
Heart and brain, body and spirit, all their 
powers, were given, poured forth without 
stint, and to others accrued the benefit. 
Even though their purpose was selfish, and 
they would gladly have grasped the crown 
without bearing the cross, they could not do it. 
A higher law was in force. A mightier power 
than their own will controlled their destiny, 
and all the lasting fame which men have 
finally accorded them was the purchase of 
sacrifice and self -relinquishment. 

The argument has also a higher scope. 
It is an addition to its force to observe that 
men eventually accord the highest honor to 
those whose self-relinquishment is not only 
real but intentional. This is self-sacrifice 
in the truest form ; where the will prompts the 
act; where the spirit of self-sacrifice sways 
the heart, while the reality covers the life. 
It is a notable testimony to the truth before 
us that this form of self-devotion, so far above 
the worldly mind, does nevertheless command 
the admiration of the world. The fame of 
Washington is brighter today than that of 
Bonaparte, simply because he had more of 
the self -devoting spirit. The glory of the 
three hundred who fell at Thermopylae 
eclipses that of the horde that slew them 
only for the same reason. 

23 



The Reason of Suffering 

Selfish as the world is, it still bows to the 
principle that makes unselfishness the path 
of honor. The law is God's and too strong to 
be set aside. Sin, blinding men's perceptions, 
may hinder and retard its working but cannot 
subvert it. Eventually it will triumph, and 
lift the self-devoted of spirit to the place of 
honor. The spectacle of a great soul giving 
itself to the world in acts of blessing, not 
blindly but willingly, is a spectacle men can- 
not resist. They bow before it instinctively 
It wins their hearts in spite of themselves. 
There is a brightness in it that cannot be hid, 
a glory that nothing can dim. The whole 
course of history, read aright, confirms the 
testimony of natural analogy, that there is 
no true exaltation but through self-abnega- 
tion, no glory but through self-sacrifice. 

A still higher truth remains. It is a state- 
ment of such unusual weight as to seem well- 
nigh incredible to say that God Himself seeks 
to glorify Himself by the medium of self- 
sacrifice. Yet it is true; and the proof is at 
hand in the person of Christ. Christ is de- 
clared to be the brightness of the Father *s 
glory, and the *' express image of His person.'* 
The very light of His light and splendor of 
His splendor; and Christ is God giving Himself 
for His worlds. Here is the divine meaning 
and mystery of the cross — God humbling, 

24 



The Splendor of Self-Sacrifice 

yet exalting Himself . God glorifying Himself 
by a sublime act of self-renunciation. God 
stooping low as Gethsemane in humiliation 
and vicarious suffering, but rising above the 
heavens in the splendor of the act. As one 
has said, " great is the God of creation, but 
greater still the God of redemption. Glorious 
is the God of power, but more glorious the 
God of love." " The heavens declare the 
glory of God "; but '* he hath set his mercy 
above the heavens," and mercy triumphed 
on the mount of sacrifice. 

Now it is this highest and most transcend- 
ent example of glory won through self- 
renunciation which the apostle presents as 
the ground of his exhortation. The picture 
is briefly drawn, but it is thrillingly graphic. 
It has three scenes. The first lifts the veil 
that hides the eternal counsels and shows us 
the Son of God sublimely resolving to re- 
nounce heaven and suffer in the flesh. The 
scene changes; and we behold a cross and a 
wasted, bleeding, mangled form nailed to its 
wood. Quickly the scene shifts again, and 
what do we see? Far above all heavens we 
behold a throne, and on it that sufferer is 
seated. A crown is on his head; a scepter 
is in his hand ; and before him are bending all 
the myriads of earth and heaven, and every 
tongue is vocal with his praise. Because he 



The Reason of Suffering 

humbled himself, " God hath highly exalted 
him, and given him a name that is above every 
name; that at the name of Jesus every knee 
should bow, of beings in heaven, and beings in 
earth, and beings under the earth, and that 
every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ 
is Lord to the glory of God the Father." 

Such is the story of Christ's exaltation. 
From the heavens he descended to earth that 
he might re-ascend above the heavens. The 
way from glory to higher glory lay by the 
cross. He reached the throne of supreme 
exaltation by the path of self-sacrifice. And 
he needed none to explain to him the reason of 
suflering. 



26 



III. 

THE UNIVERSAL CROSS 

The Cross is a principle. The familiar 
phrases in which the word appears are all 
symbolic. They hold up before us spiritual 
truths under the garb of outward facts. To 
" take the cross " is to do no particular out- 
ward act ; it is simply to adopt heartily the 
cross-principle. " Bearing the cross " is noth- 
ing else than steadily clinging to this principle 
and making it the law of life. 

The cross of Christ was not the wood to 
which he was nailed. This was but a symbol, 
though real. The true cross was rather the 
principle on which he acted in giving himself 
up to suffer for the world. This principle was 
none other than that upon which he always 
acted. His whole life and not a part merely 
was under its sway. Long before his death 
actually took place we hear him exhorting 
his disciples to take their cross and follow 
him. He had his cross always upon him. 
His work was one, and his aim was one — 
Redemption. And the method pursued was 
always the same, the outpouring, the '' empty- 
ing " of himself for the world's sake. 

27 



The Reason of Suffering 

He gave his life for the world, not merely 
in dying, but also in living. He lived for the 
world no less truly than he died for it. His 
life was one harmonious whole and must not 
be broken into fragments. His death should 
be viewed not as separate from his life but as 
part and parcel of it. The end of a career is 
as truly a part of it as the beginning, or any 
scene in it. The death of Christ was but the 
last stage of his life; the fitting close, the 
appropriate crown of his whole career. It 
did but illustrate, though in the most impres- 
sive and striking manner, the one guiding, in- 
spiring principle of his entire life. 

He was always a sufferer and that for men ; 
always a burden-bearer, and that burden was 
a world's sin and sorrow. His whole life was 
a sacrifice, a sublime act of self-devotion, of 
which the last tragical scene was but the out- 
ward exhibition and climax. The cross of 
wood which he bore on Golgotha was but the 
sign and symbol of the real cross which he had 
always borne. The cross of Christ is the spirit 
of Christ, the temper of Christ, the life of Christ 
in its deep, inward, moulding principle. What 
this principle is we partly describe by the term 
self-denial, or self-sacrifice. This is its nega- 
tive side. It is this, but it is more, and to 
stop here is to miss wholly the true idea. 
Self-denial merely for its own sake is worse 

28 



The Universal Cross 

than useless. The cross is self-denial for the 
sake of others, the renouncing of self for a 
nobler end. This is its positive side , the aim 
and desire to serve, to uplift and bless others, 
to promote the true interests, the eternal well- 
being of men. 

Untold injury has resulted from overlook- 
ing this fact, and confounding Christian self- 
denial with that of the stoic. This was the 
error of the monastic system. The monks 
erred in their self-denial, not because it was too 
severe but because it was prompted by the 
wrong motive. St. Simeon on his pillar, St. 
Anthony in his cave endured no hardships 
equal to those of Paul. But the apostle's suf- 
ferings were all incurred in the line of service. 
They were but the floods through which he 
had to struggle in order to save his fellowmen. 
Hence they were the very test, exercise and ex- 
hibition of his love. His sufferings were the 
sufferings of Christ — the same in kind. To 
use his own bold language '' he filled up that 
which was behind of the afflictions of Christ, 
in his own flesh, for his body's sake, which is 
the Church. ' ' He bore the cross by the side of 
his master. But the monks' self-denial was 
the offspring and exhibition of a mere pride of 
sanctity and was itself a sin. They bore a 
cross of their own making, not that of Christ. 
Their cross was a spurious cross ; however irk- 

29 



The Reason of Suffering 

some to the flesh it was no true cross. Self- 
inflicted sufferings are worthless; sufferings 
incurred in holy service alone have a Christian 
character. 

He truly bears the cross who makes the 
public welfare instead of private interest the 
motive of action. He merges himself in the 
community of God's children, identifies him- 
self with it, loses himself in it. He acts solely 
for the welfare of this community, shares its 
woes, assumes its burdens, strives for its up- 
lifting, and refuses to do anything for himself 
merely. With his eye on Christ the living 
head, and recalling the words, '' Inasmuch as 
ye have done it unto one of the least of these 
my brethren, ye have done it unto me," he 
aims to serve the head in the person of the 
members, and to serve the members by obey- 
ing the head. This merging of self in the 
community of God 's children ; this renouncing 
of self as the object of life, and proposing the 
welfare of that community as this object, is 
the principle shadowed forth and intended by 
the high symbol of the cross. 

The scope of this principle is exceedingly 
broad. It is in truth the great organizing 
principle of the universe. 

Organization, the joining of parts in com- 
plex wholes, is the corner stone of the universe. 
It lies at the base of that career of progress on 

30 



The Universal Cross 

which the perfection of God's works depends. 
For what would the universe be without or- 
ganization, society, fellowship? A universe 
filled only with separate atoms, with distinct 
individualities bound in no union? Evi- 
dently nothing but a chaos, a dark abyss of 
anarchy and confusion. There must be so- 
ciety, the joining of parts, the merging of in- 
dividuals in nobler wholes, or God's works of 
matter or mind must remain a reproach to 
their maker. 

But every society of whatever nature in- 
volves the cross. No other principle could call 
it into being or maintain it. For what is the 
act of forming a society? Nothing else than 
the merging of individuals in a community, 
and this is the cross. Take the simplest pos- 
sible illustration. Two men enter into part- 
nership in business. They constitute a firm, 
a society, organized for business purposes. 
But what is the act by which it is formed? 
Nothing else than the turning of their private 
interests into a common interest, the massing 
of their means and energies, the merging of 
themselves in business matters, in a com- 
munity. To this they must consent in order 
to have any fellowship. If each one clings to 
his private schemes, organized effort is ex- 
cluded. The very act of constituting the 
firm is self-devoting. In business affairs they 

31 



Thb Reason of Suffering 

cease from that moment to seek private ends. 
They seek now the interests of the firm ; they 
toil, buy, sell, only for the firm. Their money, 
time, thought, energy are henceforth given to 
the firm. In matters of business each of the 
two merges himself in the community of which 
he is a part, and this is the cross-principle. 

The like is true of all society however com- 
plex. Even the state or commonwealth rests 
on no other foundation. No other principle 
organized this vast society to which we all be- 
long (or could) than that of the cross. For 
what is the power that binds it together ; the 
power that upholds and defends it ? The an- 
swer is easy ; it is on all our tongues ; it is law. 
Law is the undergirding and framework of the 
state. Law is the force which upbuilds and 
sustains it, and without which it must immedi- 
ately perish. But what is law? Let the law- 
yers answer. They tell us that law is the cur- 
tailment of the individual liberty for the sake of 
the commonwealth. This is its nature, and 
this is its effect. Each individual is called 
upon to merge some of his interests in that of 
the state, to deny himself something for the 
good of the whole, and this again is the cross- 
principle. The civil law is the civil cross. 
The making of law is simply the state taking 
up its cross that it may escape disorganization 
and ruin. 

32 



The Universal Cross 

Law and grace are not opposed, as is some- 
times thought, but are wholly of the same 
nature. They differ in grade, not in essence. 
The law is but the cross in ruder form and 
fainter color; the cross is but the law trans- 
figured and glorified. They are but two ex- 
hibitions in varying brightness of the same 
supreme organizing principle. Do all our 
jurists and legislators understand this? When 
they proclaim the majesty of law, and tax to 
the utmost the eloquence of tongue and pen in 
its laudation, are they aware that they are but 
hanging garlands upon the cross? We fear 
not, but such is the case. All the honors paid 
to law — and who does not honor it ? Even 
breakers of law grant its necessity, and laud 
it while they trample on it — all the honors 
paid to law, and all the eagerness with which 
men for their own sakes seek the benefits of 
organized society, are so many tributes laid 
at his feet whose work it was to establish and 
uphold the cross. Surely every knee shall bow 
to him, and every tongue confess him Lord, 
for already, though with hearts averse, the 
hands of all men are busy preparing his crown. 
Their maxims and practice equally conspire 
to exalt the principle which yet their hearts 
reject. They do it because they must. This 
principle is sovereign. God has made it so. 
He could do no less. Not otherwise could He 

33 



The Reason of Suffering 

have any kingdom, any organized realm over 
which to reign. If there was to be any society, 
any fellowship in the world, the cross must 
create it. God must exalt it and make it su- 
preme, or there would be nothing in His uni- 
verse but scattered fragments. 

** The heavens declare the glory of God " ; 
but it is only because the cross is stamped 
upon them. The worlds are a community, a 
goodly fellowship, where each contributes to 
the splendor of the whole. No sun shines for 
itself. No burning star is fired up for its own 
behoof. No planet or satellite moves on its 
path regardless of others. All is public, com- 
mon, social. The energy of each is expended 
for the whole, and the splendor of each is the 
splendor of the whole shed back upon itself. 
Strike out this grand organizing principle and 
the glories of the firmament would vanish like 
a dream. The framework of the skies would 
dissolve like mist, and the universe become a 
vast abyss of impenetrable darkness filled 
with the jarring fragments of dismembered 
worlds. 

The eyes of our sailors in the southern seas 
are greeted at night by a spectacle well worth 
the journey to see. A cross, made up of 
mighty suns and glittering nebulae, bends over 
their heads, forming a constellation whose 
brilliance and beauty are the wonder and de- 

34 



The Universal Cross 

light of all beholders. No accident, methinks, 
so ranged those shining spheres. The hand of 
God, rather let us say, set them in their place 
a not unworthy symbol of the grandest of 
truths. Far out in the depths of the heavens, 
and bright above all around, it blazes from 
age to age, a beautiful token that not even the 
firmament could have any glory without the 
cross ! 

But further it will appear on careful 
thought that the cross is fundamentally the 
civilizing principle. 

It creates society ; it also civilizes, elevates 
and improves it externally. In other words, 
it endows it with all the outward, temporal 
well-being of which it is, or is to be, the pos- 
sessor. Men are slow to acknowledge this. 
How common the feeling that temporal good 
has no particular connection with the cross. 
Here the worldling feels secure. Spiritual 
blessings may come from the cross, but not so, 
he thinks, with earthly good. Here he is inde- 
pendent. Here he may revel and gather his 
spoils and pay no allegiance to the cross. Here 
is a sphere of effort and enjoyment wholly out 
from beneath its shadow. 

Nations have thought so. Entire peoples, 
like the French at one period, pursuing suc- 
cessfully the path of outward improvement, 
have fancied that because they openly re- 

35 



The Reason op Suffering 

jected the cross it had nothing to do with their 
prosperity. And some of our freethinkers 
have urged the fact as an argument against 
the reaUty or necessity of Christ's reign. No 
mistake could be more utter; no blindness 
more complete ! Civilization apart from the 
cross ! It is impossible. Every stage of its 
progress is wholly due to the cross. Not a step 
could be taken without it, whether recognized 
or not. All the improvement ever attained, 
even in outward, temporal well-being, has 
been the direct creation and outgrowth of the 
cross-principle. 

For what is the recognized condition of such 
improvement? Fortunately the answer is 
easy. On no point are economists better 
agreed. They tell us that it is classification of 
labor ; the confining of each individual (in the 
main) to one kind of employment, to the fur- 
nishing of some single product for the common 
supply. On this condition all depends. Just 
so fast as it is fulfilled, and no faster, society 
advances. So long as each individual insists 
on dividing his energies in the attempt to 
supply with his own hand his varied needs he 
remains a savage. His condition cannot im- 
prove until he consents to the classification, 
the distribution or division of labor. 

But what now is this classifying of labor? 
What but applying to labor of every form, the 

36 



The Universal Cross 

cross-principle? It is nothing else. The 
moment a man confines his exertions to a 
single line of effort, that moment his toil 
ceases to have reference immediately to his 
own wants and begins to hold in view the 
wants of the public. He works now for the 
public. His thought, energy, life, pour forth 
their results into the common treasury, while 
his private aims disappear from the surface. 
In outward things he merges himself in the 
community to which he belongs, identifies 
himself with it, labors for it, and shares its 
losses and gains. In a word he has taken the 
cross, not indeed in heart, but in outward act. 
Such is the inexorable condition of outward 
well-being; an outward cross an outward 
obedience to the cross-principle. All the bene- 
fits of civilization are the immediate outgrowth 
and creation of this principle. 

How great these benefits are a glance may 
reveal. On the one hand look at society re- 
fusing to apply this principle. Here each man 
is outwardly selfish. He toils for himself, 
plans for himself, directs all his efforts to the 
immediate supply of his own individual wants. 
He centers his activities all in himself and has 
constant, exclusive regard to his own private 
interests. And what is he? A barbarian, a 
savage, a dweller in wigwams and mud-hovels ; 
a wanderer in forests and deserts, contending 

37 



The Reason of Suffering 

with the beasts for Ufe and sustenance. He is 
ignorant, superstitious, cruel, revengeful. His 
body is stunted, his intellect dwarfed, his heart 
depraved. He is degraded, physically, men- 
tally, morally, and reduced almost to the level 
of the brutes on whom he preys. In a word 
he remains under all the evils of an uncivilized 
condition. 

On the other hand look at society under 
the sway of the cross-principle. Here each 
man's life is outwardly unselfish. In outward 
things he plans and acts for the public benefit, 
and merges his own interest in that of the com- 
munity. And, behold ! his outward condition 
is transformed and exalted. He is lifted at 
once to a higher grade and species of life. He 
is enlightened, educated, refined. His tastes 
are corrected and his higher impulses rapidly 
unfolded. He has good houses, furniture, 
clothing, food. He surrounds himself with all 
the appliances of comfort and refinement. 
Art, music, literature, mechanical skill, are 
laid under tribute for his enjoyment. He 
dwells in cities, worships in temples, rides in 
palaces, and forces even the lightning to run 
on his errands. In short he reaches and enjoys 
a state of outward happiness and well-being 
as unlike that of the savage as the Garden of 
Eden was unlike a desert waste. 

Little cause indeed have the freethinkers to 

38 



The Universal Cross 

glory in their theories. ** Such glorying is not 
good." That civilization of which they have 
so much to say, with all its really unmeasured 
benefits, is the direct outgrowth and fruit of 
the cross-principle. All the paeans of which 
it is the theme are but so many uncon- 
scious acknowledgments of the benign suprem- 
acy and sovereignty of the cross. 

It is also well worth noticing that it is the 
true harmonizing principle. 

*' Where strife is," says an apostle, ** there 
is confusion and every evil work." There 
must be harmony of act and feeling among 
God's creatures, or happiness is impossible. 
Strife, with envy its root, must be eradicated 
from men's hearts or outward gifts will but 
enhance the inward woe. But how can this be 
done in the face of so many evident inequalities 
of human condition? God's gifts are sov- 
ereignly bestowed and their variety is infinite. 
He places His creatures in different grades, in 
ranks rising one above another, in consequence 
of the different powers, gifts and opportunities 
with which they are endowed. We are met on 
every side with the most striking and often 
painful diversities. The palace and hovel con- 
front each other. The king and the slave, the 
prince and the peasant, walk side by side. The 
half-witted clown is born in the same street 
with a Shakespeare or a Newton. The beggar 

39 



The Reason of Suffering 

in his rags lies at the gate of Dives clothed in 
silk and faring sumptuously every day. 

How are these things to be understood? 
Is God unjust? Are His ways unequal? Is 
there partiality with Him? Does He con- 
descend to practice favoritism ? Does He have 
His favorites on whom He weakly lavishes His 
gifts careless of the want and woe of others? 
Such indeed must have been the conclusion 
had God enthroned any other principle than 
that of the cross. But this principle equalizes, 
harmonizes all, and removes every vestige of 
unfairness. God's plan is that every man 
should bear the cross in the full sense of the 
phrase — that he should use all his gifts and 
powers, and that heartily, in the service of 
others. 

Under the working of this principle what 
man has cause to complain? The gifts of 
others are also his. When they received them 
they received also the command to use them 
for him. to pass them over in due time to him. 
They are but the distributors, the almoners of 
God's bounty. The more they receive the 
better for him. Sooner or later he reaps the 
fruit of the gift. By the cross-principle God 
aims to bind all His creatures into one com- 
munity, one body and thus bring all, even the 
weakest, under the full stream of His out- 
flowing grace. None of His gifts are private, 

40 



The Universal Cross 

exclusive. All are public, common. All are 
bestowed upon the whole body, and not upon 
a part, save as a channel. What He does for 
one, He does for all through that one as a 
medium. The whole body is benefited when 
any member is benefited. Clothing the feet 
benefits the head scarcely less than the feet 
themselves. All that is done for a part of the 
body is done for the whole ; eventually every 
part shares in the gift. And so in like manner, 
by the working of the cross-principle, all God's 
gifts are distributed throughout the entire 
community of His subjects. 

Here at a glance appears the cause of the 
disorders of society. We trample on this 
principle. Our hearts reject it. We selfishly 
cling to the gifts of God instead of conse- 
crating them to the public use. We betray 
our trust. We turn robbers and defraud the 
community of that which God has sent us to 
bestow. I have no right to any of God's gifts 
for a selfish use. All He has given me is for 
the public ; it is robbery to withhold it. My 
time, thought, energy, means, all belong under 
God to the public. God has given me nothing 
to keep, but all to distribute; I am not an 
owner, but a steward. All unnecessary with- 
holding is open wrong. If I squander my 
means in self-indulgence I commit a fraud. If 
I use my money for selfish ends I am guilty of 

41 



The Reason of Suffering 

theft as really as if I had stolen it from the 
vaults of a bank. 

What wonder the world is cursed with 
envying, strife, and wrong. Sin has made it a 
camp of robbers ! In our business centers it 
happens on certain days that all, or nearly all, 
have bills to pay ; that is they have in trust 
property belonging to others. On such a day 
suppose that all should resolve at once to 
demand their dues but refuse to pay what was 
due from themselves. Would there be no con- 
fusion? Especially if each man should be 
blinded to his own guilt (excusing it on some 
pretext) but keen to discern that of his neigh- 
bors? Think you there would be no tumult, 
no wrath, no contention, no deeds of blood? 
Yet this is a picture no whit overdrawn of the 
state of society. Under law, to be unselfish 
we have all become selfish. Under law, to use 
our gifts for the public benefit we have self- 
ishly clutched them for our own behoof. We 
are marauders, outlaws, freebooters in God's 
heritage. We have all turned thieves at once ; 
we all withhold those gifts which belong to the 
community; and what is the result? Envy, 
jealousy, rivalry, restless ambitions, hatred, 
anger, discontent, making a hell in every 
bosom; poverty, rags, half-paid toil, un- 
righteous exactions, fraud, oppression, rob- 
bery, murder, every foul and hateful deed, 

42 



The Universal Cross 

blasting the earth with a havoc and ruin over 
which angels might weep ! 

The only refuge is the cross. 

The dream of fanatics (like the Jacobins 
of Paris) of healing these woes by erasing all 
distinctions among men, and bringing all 
down on the same level of rank and possession, 
is the baldest absurdity. Suppose it were 
done, what then? A change from bad to 
worse. Such a general leveling would give a 
death blow to all that remains of social life. 
With such a literal, mechanical equality, there 
would be no need or place for mutual good 
offices. All sympathy, help, gratitude; all 
giving and receiving ; all exchange of mutual 
service ; all holy self-denial and sacrifice would 
be impossible. In a word, there would be no 
love — no holy love — and no room for it , 
and if no love, then no spiritual blessedness, 
no paradise of souls, no kingdom of heaven, 
no joy everlasting ! Each individual wrapped 
up in himself, and sufficient unto himself, 
society would be reduced to a mass of mutually 
repellent fragments, a bundle of mere inde- 
pendencies, as much unlike God's mighty 
kingdom of love, with its endless variety of 
rank and power, as a heap of stones is unlike a 
grand cathedral, or a pile of chips is unlike a 
symmetrical tree. 

There is no remedy but the cross. In the 

43 



The Reason of Suffering 

nature of the case nothing else can avail. 
When all men enthrone the cross in their 
hearts, and begin to live for the public good, 
society will be redeemed. All its wounds will 
be healed ; each member will accept his place 
and do his work, and the harmony of the 
whole will be established. Where each is 
striving for the good of all, there can be no 
envy, no pride, no restless ambition, no wrong. 
Such is the state to which God is leading us. 
Wrought by the cross-principle into one har- 
monious whole, each of the members of His 
kingdom, when perfected, will become an in- 
heritor of all the blessings in store for that 
kingdom, and be satisfied with the fulness of 
God. 

But still further it must be said that we 
have in the cross, in a high sense, the true life- 
giving principle. 

Life is a joint stock possession. It belongs 
always to a body, to an assemblage of parts 
forming a complex whole. A mere atom or 
lump, a homogeneous mass can have no life ; 
an individuality, strictly so-called, cannot 
possess it. It belongs to a community. It 
must be common, the joint property of several 
members forming one body. There must be a 
whole consisting of parts, and those parts so 
attempered as to form a community, each part 
subserving the needs of all. 

44 



The Universal Cross 

Look at the tree. Here is life in its lowest 
form. But what is the law of its growth? 
the principle which gives it life? None other 
than that just mentioned, mutual service, the 
principle of the cross. Every part is at work 
not for itself but for the whole tree. The 
roots, the trunk, the branches, the leaves, are 
all busy in nourishing the whole tree. The 
relations are reciprocal. The trunk is no more 
for the branches than the branches for the 
trunk. The moisture from the roots ascends 
to the leaves; and the carbon from the air 
inhaled by the leaves descends to the roots. 
In the service of each part every part shares. 
The tree is a community, a fellowship, an as- 
semblage of individual members under the 
sway of the cross-principle. In this is its life. 
We think of the life only as the force which 
thus organizes the tree. In this alone the tree 
differs from the mineral substances out of 
which it was formed. The elements are the 
same ; their nature, their powers, are all un- 
changed. This change only has passed upon 
it, it has come under the sway of the cross- 
principle, and behold, it lives ! The change is 
a resurrection, a passing from death to life. 
Lifeless matter passes under the sway of the 
cross-principle and we have the living, grow- 
ing tree. 

The same is true of animal life even in a 

45 



The Reason of Suffering 

fuller measure. Here the body is more deli- 
cately wrought. The organism is more com- 
plex. The whole has more parts, the com- 
munity more members. In a word the cross- 
principle has wider sweep and more perfect 
control. The organs of our body, like the 
parts of a tree, serve each other ; each is for all, 
and all for each. And in this mutual service 
is its life. 

With these facts as a key, we are able at 
once to solve the mighty problem of spiritual 
life. The soul by itself alone can have no life. 
It must have fellowship. It must be or- 
ganized, brought into union with other souls. 
There must be a society, a community of 
spirits in which each soul merges itself, and 
loses itself in order that it may have life. This 
leaving of self to join in a fellowship is living. 
The words imply it. They are closely related. 
They have the same root, as has also another 
word of yet greater import and that is love. 
Leave, love, live ; these are the three kindred 
expressions through which the full-orbed truth 
shines forth. Love is spiritual leaving. Going 
out of self, leaving of self, as a spiritual act, is 
just that which alone is properly named love. 
''Hereby we know love," says the sacred 
writer, " hereby we know love (know what it 
is perceive its true nature) in that he {i.e. 
Christ) laid down his life for us ; and we ought 

46 



The UniveRvSal Cross 

to lay down our life for the brethren." Spirit- 
ual life is spiritual love, and love is self-sacri- 
fice, self-devotion, in a word the cross in its 
highest, divinest form. 

The soul that rejects the cross can have no 
life. Devoted to self and shut up in itself that 
soul is dead. It has no spiritual union, no 
fellowship with God or the members of His 
kingdom. It is a dead branch cut off from the 
vine. A member torn from the spiritual body 
to which it should belong. Tear off an arm 
from the body of flesh, and it perishes. It has 
no life in itself and no power of life. The life 
is in the body. The life is common to all the 
members, and ceases to be when they cease to 
unite in a body. The soul by itself can have no 
life. Refusing the cross is but a wretched 
fragment, a member torn off from the spiritual 
body where alone there is life. That life is 
common ; it throbs and circulates through the 
whole body, but cannot exist in a separate 
member. 

There is no life for a single soul. There is 
no heaven for a single soul. Heaven is a fel- 
lowship, a vast community of spirits united to 
God and to one another by the power of the 
cross-principle. Christ is its head and God 
dwells in it ; for where love is God is, for God is 
love. God dwells in it, makes it His temple, 
reveals Himself through it, and fills every part 

47 



The Reason of Suffering 

with light and glory. That spiritual love 
which is but the cross in the spiritual form has 
perfect control and pours through every part 
the life of God and the blessedness of God. 
All the glory of God's spiritual kingdom; all 
the purity and bliss of heaven are the fruit and 
creation of the life-giving principle of the cross. 

The cross is supreme. God has enthroned 
it and made it sovereign. It is the very center 
and method and end of all His purposes. All 
in the universe that bears the stamp of good 
flows forth from it. All order, beauty, glory, 
in heaven and earth are its creation. All 
society, all social harmony and life, all tem- 
poral well-being and happiness among men, 
with all its increase from age to age, are due 
to its working. All spiritual life and joy, all 
the blessedness of souls redeemed with all the 
eternal glories of the kingdom of God, are its 
product and fruitage. 

Its presence is ever3nvhere. Instead of 
beholding it in Christ's death alone, we see it 
stamped on all God's works. All His work- 
ings are shaped to it and moulded by it. 
Everywhere in the world around us, the hand 
of God holds it up to view. The whole crea- 
tion of God has for its end to embody it, give 
it scope, exalt and enthrone it. It is written 
on the heavens in the order of systems, the 
sublime march of planets, and the splendor of 

48 



The Universal Cross 

stars and suns. It is stamped on the earth in 
the wealth of vegetable and animal life which 
redeems it from desolation. It looks out 
from the bloom of every flower, waves in the 
boughs of every tree, and speaks in the song of 
every carolling bird. It is seen at work wher- 
ever society exists among men. In all the joys 
of social intercourse in home or hall, in all 
that is refining, enlightening, ennobling in the 
onward march of civilization from age to age, 
its glory appears. And, finally, on ** the hill 
called Golgotha," it shines forth in tran- 
scendent brightness in the sacrifice of Christ ; 
appearing now as the very outpouring of 
God's own eternal life into the world's bosom, 
laying the foundation of that mighty spiritual 
kingdom into which he who enters lives forever. 
The following lines addressed to Christ re- 
veal an experience that accords with the truth : 

"Once my imprisoned spirit lay, 

Fast bound in sin and nature's night; 
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray; 

I woke; the dungeon flamed with light. 
My chain fell off, my heart was free, 
I rose, went forth, and followed thee. 
No condemnation now I dread, 

Jesus, with all in him, is mine; 
Alive in him, my living head, 

And clothed in righteousness divine, 
Bold, I approach the eternal throne, 
And claim the crown through Christ my own." 

49 



IV. 

THE MULTIPLIED CROSSES 

It is common to think of the sacrifice of 
Christ as something unique ; a solitary event 
in the history of the universe, unapproachable 
in its grandeur, never before paralleled, and 
never again to be repeated. 

In one sense this is true. So far as this 
sacrifice was an atonement for the sins of the 
whole world, it stands alone, unmatched and 
mysterious, and never to be repeated. 

Let us not, however, make the mistake of 
supposing that this is true absolutely and in 
every sense ; for there is a sense in which the 
exact opposite is true; a sense in which his 
sacrifice is to be imitated, repeated and re- 
enacted by every one of his disciples till time 
shall end. 

This is precisely the thought contained in 
one remarkable passage of Scripture. Paul, 
speaking of the influence of Christ's love upon 
himself and upon all true followers, asserts that 
this love is a constraining power, because we 
thus judge that if one died for all then they all 
died — as it reads in the original. (2 Cor. 5: 
14, 15.) 

50 



The Multiplied Crosses 

What does he mean by saying that Christ's 
people died when he died? What do we mean 
when we say of a man stung by a cobra that he 
is a dead man? We look into the future and 
speak of an inevitable event to come as if 
already present. 

What do we mean when we say that the 
first gun fired against Fort Sumter struck the 
fetters from four millions of slaves? We do 
not imply that such a result was instantly ac- 
complished, but that it was made sure. That 
act insulted the flag. It touched to the quick 
the national honor. It set on fire the hearts of 
the people. It constituted the slaveholders 
rebels and forfeited for them all claim to the 
protection of the government. It lighted the 
flames of civil war ; and war as it surged on to 
its certain end in their subjugation was sure to 
demolish the odious slave-system. In a word 
that gun freed the slaves because it set in 
operation a line of causes, and inaugurated a 
chain of events which were sure to end in that 
result. 

In the same way we properly say that it 
was the drunkard's first glass that ruined him 
and beggared his family. The result was not 
instantaneous. For a long time neither he nor 
his friends had any suspicion of what was 
before them. But that first glass was the first 
step aside. It was then he entered the wrong 

51 



The Reason op Suffering 

path and embraced the wrong principle for the 
guide of his action. Then he opened the door 
of his soul for the entrance of the siren of self- 
indulgence. The angel of self-denial and ab- 
stinence took flight. The demon of appetite 
woke up, no more to sleep, and the old beaten 
track that leads down to ruin was unresistingly 
travelled. He fell when he took that first 
glass, and his family fell with him, because 
that act set in motion causes and influences 
which were sure to plunge them into wretched- 
ness. 

The older theologians had a sound mean- 
ing, when they said that we all fell in Adam 
and sinned in him. Men could not fall before 
they existed, or sin before they were born; 
but the certainty that they all would do so 
when brought upon the stage of action, might 
be and was established, they believed, at the 
beginning. They held that Adam stood in 
such a relation to us that the moment he 
sinned the stream of the race life was polluted 
at the fountain. His act set in motion causes 
that would spread sin over the world. He was 
the original bond of union between God and 
the race. Had he been steadfast, his whole 
personality would have been a living channel 
of holy influence flowing freely from the divine 
heart to his offspring, even as the great artery 
conveys the vital blood from the seat of life to 



The Multiplied Crosses 

the minutest tissues of the body. But he 
broke the union, and yielded to temptation. 
Satan found access to his inner life. Hell in- 
stead of heaven now used him as a channel ; 
and the stream of moral defilement rushed 
down through the generations, as surely as 
poison once injected into the veins permeates 
the whole body. As a single blow may loosen 
the toppling avalanche on its path of ruin, so 
Adam's first act of transgression precipitated 
upon the world the avalanche of universal sin 
and sorrow. When he fell, we fell ; when he 
died, spiritually, we died, because his act set in 
motion a series of baleful causes which were 
sure to produce the awful result. Such is the 
theory and none can deny that it is logical and 
self-consistent. 

Thus in exactly the opposite sense of the 
word ** death " Paul asserts that Christ's peo- 
ple died when he died; died, that is, to self, 
to the world, to sin. His redeeming love was 
also a constraining love. His sacrifice not 
only made expiation ; there was power in it of 
a marvellous order. It loosened causes and 
started influences of a gracious omnipotence 
to lift up his own. His sublime act of self- 
abnegation was sure to beget in those united 
to him by faith the same temper, so that they 
also would offer themselves upon the altar of 
service, and thus imitate him. 

53 



The Reason of Suffering 

Thus we understand how Paul could im- 
mediately say that Christ died for his own; 
that they should no longer live unto them- 
selves, but unto their Lord. Though having 
died, they are still alive. The dying was in- 
deed but living and that anew. The two acts 
were really one act viewed on different sides. 
To die to the world is to live unto God. The 
death is a living death, a death accomplished 
in a life lived on another and a higher 
plane. 

General Swift understood this well, and 
when he stood up in Boston to tell his ex- 
perience, and how he had first confessed 
Christ in a social meeting, he declared that 
it required more courage to rise and make 
known his determination in that little prayer 
circle, than to face the rattle of musketry 
or the roar of cannon on the field of battle; 
*' but," said he, "I resolved that I would 
die unto self that I might live unto God." 

When a young tree is cut off near the 
root, and the stem of another tree grafted 
in, its life has changed. The old has been 
replaced by the new. The end of the old and 
the beginning of the new are one event 
looked at on different sides. Dying to the 
world and living unto Christ are spiritually 
one act. And so in the passage quoted 
they that died in Christ are in the next clause 

54 



The Multiplied Crosses 

declared to be alive, even as they now live 
unto him. 

Is it then true that Christ died in order 
that we might die? It certainly is. This is 
exactly the apostle's thought. 

We are wont to say that he died for us 
that we might not die , and this also is true ; 
but the death we are thus to escape is the 
everlasting death of guilt and condemna- 
tion. It is well to say this and to dwell 
upon it; but this is not the truth brought 
to view in the Bible when we are told that 
Christ died for us and rose again. It has 
the opposite turn. He rose that we might 
also rise, not that we might not rise. And 
hence it must mean that he died for us 
that we might die to the world and sin. 
This is the scriptural form of expression, 
and it conveys a truth that is full of life 
and power. 

From this point of view we get a new 
light upon other sayings of Scripture. 

How often are we told that if we would 
be Christ's we must take up our cross and 
follow him. But who was it that was re- 
quired to take up the cross and to be seen 
carrying it along the road that led out of the 
city? Only those who were shortly to be 
stretched upon it. And what does Paul 
mean when he says, " I am crucified with 

55 



The Reason of Suffering 

Christ,'* but that he was in some sense imita- 
ting the sacrifice of his Master? 

In principle, in deepest reality, we are 
to imitate it. Our sacrifice, our self- offering, 
is to be the same as his, as a spiritual, per- 
sonal act; according to our measure we are, 
each of us, to make a repetition of it. But 
in this very language one marked difference 
is implied. Our sacrifice is an imitation. It 
is derived, not original. It is a result, an 
effect, and not self-originated. We die in 
this gracious sense because he died. But 
his sacrifice is original. It is underived. 
It was self -originated. It had no cause 
outside of himself. No being had set him 
the example, or pointed out the way. His 
sacrifice was his own in the fullest and 
divinest sense. 

The light of the sun and of the planets 
is the same in essence. In both cases it is 
simply light; but with the sun it is original, 
while with the planets it is mere derived 
light reflected from him. And in his beams 
there is a splendor and a power not possible 
to a planet. So Christ, in his great self- 
originated act of self-abnegation, surpasses 
by an unknown measure his disciples, who 
nevertheless are to shine as by reflected 
light. 

The difference arising from his divinity, 

56 



The Multiplied Crosses 

cannot, of course, escape us. His sacrifice 
was measureless in degree, because in him dwelt 
a divine life ; and thus it takes on a majesty 
and a value that is wholly unapproachable. 
Ours can be but human, finite, limited, 
and not in this respect to be compared with 
his; and yet, in its essence, it is to be like 
his ; just as a circle but an inch in diameter 
is as truly a circle, as one vast enough to 
compass the universe. 

The summer field sparkles in beauty 
in the morning light because every one of 
its ten thousand dewdrops carries in its 
bosom a miniature sun. The dewdrop is 
as nothing to the sun, but it can reflect his 
image. And the Church arises and shines, 
the glory of the Lord having risen upon 
her, when his sacrifice is imaged forth, 
repeated in miniature in the consecrated 
lives of his disciples. 

" I am the vine, ye are the branches," 
says Christ. The life of the branch is derived 
from the vine, and is but a little stream 
from an exhaustless fount; and yet it is 
the same life that surges up through the 
vine that throbs also in the branches; and 
upon the branches are the grape clusters 
really to grow. 

Thus we are brought face to face with 
the great practical truth, that if we would 

57 



The Reason of Suffering 

be useful we must not shun the cross nor 
the suffering that may come with it. ReHgion 
is sacrifice. The spirit of benevolent effort 
is a self-sacrificing spirit. God's work is 
to go on in the same way that it began — the 
way of sacrifice. Christ's blood cemented 
the foundation. The blood of the martyrs 
has been necessary to build up the walls. 
And if we are to have any part in the work 
it will be through sacrifice; which must 
often mean suffering. 



58 



V. 

THE MANY-SIDED ATONEMENT 

The word atonement often occurs in the 
Old Testament. The Hebrew word which 
it there represents means *' covering; '* that 
is, the covering over of the guilt of the 
penitent with the blood of the sacrifice, as 
if to hide it from view, and thus re-establish 
the broken fellowship with God. 

In the New Testament the word occurs 
only in one passage, and represents a Greek 
word elsewhere rendered, " reconciliation," 
and is so rendered here in the Revised Ver- 
sion. It is an advance on the Old Testament 
word, setting forth the dynamic element of 
atonement, the power that resides in it to 
bring back the alienated will and life into 
harmony with the divine will and life. 

This great fact of atonement has to be 
approached by the help of analogies, pictures, 
or illustrations. For only in this way can 
the human mind deal successfully with that 
which is vast, or it may be illimitable. With 
these helps it is able to learn much of such 
subjects, of which otherwise it would remain 
almost if not altogether ignorant. 

59 



The Reason of Suffering 

No human eye has ever surveyed a con- 
tinent. All that it could ever take within 
the sweep of its glance at a given time is but 
a speck compared with the vast reality. 
Were no help to be obtained by some form 
of pictures or illustrations, civilized man 
would remain as ignorant of the true form 
and relations of the great bodies of land 
on our planet as the most degraded of sav- 
ages. But by the help of a map, which is 
but a rude picture or illustration, he arrives 
at valuable if not perfect knowledge. 

And so this great continental truth of 
atonement, which sums up the work of the 
world's Redeemer, baffles the human intel- 
lect, until it resorts to pictures or analogies, 
by which to conceive and represent it to 
itself. These pictures and analogies have 
been various and manifold. All are of 
real value if it be remembered that they are 
only illustrations, but they are sure to 
mislead if this be forgotten; as if a child 
should dream that a map on which he was 
gazing was the actual continent on which 
he lived, because some teacher had pointed 
to it and said, ** There is America." 

Were a mere sketch of a high mountain 
held up before us, no one would hesitate 
to say, ''That is a mountain;" but he 
would be much disconcerted if any one under- 

60 



The Many-sided Atonement 

stood it to be more than a rude representa- 
tion of a mountain. 

Even as a representation it is exceedingly 
meager and imperfect. That waving line 
may picture well the irregular outline as 
seen from a distance; but what does the 
white space inside of the line represent? 
Why, nothing definite or precise. That part 
does not apply, and never was meant to 
apply. Only the line applies; all the rest is 
simply the necessary material on which the 
line is to appear. All that we can learn 
from a sketch about a mountain is given 
in that line, and the rest is simply to be 
ignored. 

Another artist might put in the blank 
space some skilful penciling, indicating the 
rugged, broken character of the mountain's 
side, and this might constitute a drawing 
of the mountain. It is fuller than the sketch, 
but there are still plenty of blank spaces. 

Another hand might use the crayon to 
show the precipices, forests, and beetling 
cliffs, and thus use up more of the blank 
space, and give us still more information 
about the mountain; but yet it would be 
very imperfect, and much would remain 
that did not apply. Because the lines were 
black, we could not infer that the mountain 
was black; neither because white spaces 

61 



The Reason of Suffering 

remained, could we infer that the mountain 
had white patches upon it. 

A step further might be taken. A skilful 
hand might give to that canvas the proper 
coloring, and show us the rocks in brown, 
the earth in dun, the forests in green, and 
the cloud-capped summit in cerulean blue, 
and thus give us a beautiful painting of the 
mountain; and this would be a far better 
picture than either of the others; but even 
this would be far enough from the great 
reality. No human skill could ever depict 
the infinite fullness of detail, of leaf and 
twig, grass and flower, rock and pebble, 
and shining dust particle which nature holds 
up to our view in the mountain itself. 

If the four pictures, the sketch, the 
drawing, the crayon, the painting, were 
presented before us together, they would 
simply enable us to take so many steps 
toward a true conception of the mountain, 
but neither of them, nor all of them com- 
bined, could give us the whole truth; and 
any one who should profess to contend that 
either of them was the mountain itself 
would be set down as hopelessly distraught. 

Yet this is precisely what men have done 
with the pictures, or analogies, which they 
have brought forward, of the atonement. 
Forgetting that they were only illustra- 

62 



The Many-sided Atonement 

tions, only a portion of which could possibly 
apply, they have pressed the analogies too 
far, and have fallen to quarrelling as to 
which picture shall be called the thing 
itself; whereas neither can be so called. 
All are of value as bringing out and making 
distinct some one or more features of the 
great reality; though neither of them, nor 
all of them combined, exhaust that reality. 

This picture-theology, as it might fairly 
be called, is responsible for no end of con- 
fusion and misrepresentation. It arises from 
an abuse of analogies; whereas their proper 
use as analogies leads us safely toward the 
light. 

The pictures or analogies of the atone- 
ment, which have been mistakenly put for 
theories by careless thinkers, are mainly 
four; all useful as illustrations, but all mis- 
leading if pressed too far. 

1. First, we have the mercantile analogy, 
corresponding to the sketch or outline of 
the mountain. 

It proceeds thus: A man is in debt, 
which misfortune has made so enormous 
that he never can pay. He is ruined beyond 
hope, if left to the unhindered operation of 
the law. But another man of boundless 
wealth becomes his benefactor, and pays 
off the whole bill as a free gift to him, and 

63 



The Reason of Suffering 

all his troubles are over. This, say some, 
IS the atonement. By no means. It is only 
a rude analogy, like the sketch of the moun- 
tain. Two things however do come out in 
marked prominence; namely, our absolute 
need of help, and the purely free grace of 
Christ in meeting that need. But the moment 
we go farther we are misled; for the rest 
of the picture is blank space and does not 
apply. The debtor in the case supposed 
was absolutely free the moment his debt 
was paid; and no one else was or could be 
set free by that act. If this element is pressed 
we have a limited atonement, provided only 
for the actually saved, or the elect, which 
was the rock on which the old school theology 
foundered. 

How much, too, is left unhinted in this 
rude analogy. It tells us nothing of any 
change in the debtor's character, of any 
suffering on the part of the benefactor, or 
of any peculiar relation which he sustains 
either to the debtor or creditor; and yet 
these points are of immense importance in 
any full view of the atonement. No, the 
universe is not a mart of trade. God is no 
ordinary creditor, nor sin an ordinary debt, 
nor Christ a mere man like the rest of us, 
who can help us out of our difficulty by so 
simple and painless an act as paying out a 

64 



The Many-sided Atonement 

number of dollars which will never be missed. 
We have here not the atonement, but only 
a rude sketch which applies only to the 
two points of absolute need on our part, 
and utterly free grace on the part of Christ; 
but for setting forth these two points it has 
its advantages. 

2. Secondly, we have the juridical analogy, 
corresponding to the drawing of the moun- 
tain. 

It runs thus: a man is condemned for a 
capital crime. Another person his father, 
his son, or some intimate friend, moved by 
irresistible affection, takes his place, becomes 
his substitute, and saves his life by dying 
in his stead. 

This, some believe, is the atonement; 
but it is only another analogy. It does 
present the facts made prominent by the 
mercantile picture — our need and Christ's 
grace — and it adds another feature of ex- 
ceeding significance, namely, Christ's suffering 
in the exhibition of his grace ; and this is an 
advance on the first. 

No further must it be pressed, or we shall 
have limited atonement as in the first case; 
and equally, as in that case, we have no 
hint of change of character in man, and none 
of the peculiar relation of Christ to God and 
to man. 

65 



The Reason of Suffering 

No, this is not the atonement, but another 
picture. The universe is not a court room. 
God is no ordinary judge, with no special 
interest in the prisoner at the bar. Sin is 
not merely a solitary act of transgression 
of a definite law; and Christ is not merely 
a fellow-being admitted to take our place on 
the scaffold, which would hardly be thought 
a regular procedure even under civil law. 

The blank spaces — the portions of the 
picture that do not apply — are still quite 
numerous, and there is room for another 
picture. 

3. Thirdly we have the governmental 
analogy, corresponding to the drawing. It 
proceeds as follows: A man has cast off 
his allegiance to his rightful sovereign, and 
joined a company of rebels. They are de- 
feated, and he is seized and justly condemned 
to die; but the king's son, heir to the throne 
and beloved of his father, intercedes for him 
and gains the privilege of saving him and 
all the rebels who throw down their arms, 
by being executed in their stead. 

Grave and reverend philosophers have 
assured us that this is the atonement. But 
it is only another picture, very striking and 
effective, but still imperfect. 

Yet it is an advance on the juridical 
picture, just as the crayon is an advance on 

66 



The Many-sided Atonement 

the drawing. It holds fast the facts of our 
need and Christ's grace and suffering, and 
adds the fathomless fact that this suffering 
substitute holds a unique relation both to 
the king and the saved rebel — saved if he 
actually returns to his allegiance. 

This is a great advance on the former 
analogies. It escapes a limited atonement, 
since it provides for all on certain conditions. 
It also gives some hint of a change in man, 
under the form of the rebel's submission; 
and has the great merit of showing us not 
merely suffering, but divine suffering, as 
the price of our redemption; but it fails to 
show God's true relation to us as He who 
so loved us as to send His son, not wait for 
His son to intercede with Him ; and its hint 
of a change in us is all too dim, not neces- 
sarily implying a deep and radical change 
of heart and character, as well as of external 
attitude toward law. 

No, this is not the atonement, but only 
another picture. The universe is not a civil 
state. God is not a mere powerful monarch, 
with only a general regard for His subjects, 
with no special personal interest in them; 
and even needing to be moved by the plead- 
ing of another. 

There is room for more to be said. Has 
anything more been said? Nothing by the 

67 



The Reason op Suffering 

philosophers. Nothing by the theologians. 
But Christ himself has drawn us a picture 
with a master's hand or rather a triple pic- 
ture, culminating in the third. 

4. He tells us of the lost piece of money 
hunted for until found. He shows us the 
compassionate shepherd going after the wan- 
dering sheep and actually placing it on his 
shoulders and bringing it back to the fold. 

He lets us see the prodigal son demand- 
ing his inheritance, breaking fellowship with 
his father, squandering all in riotous living, 
sinking into self- caused misery and degrada- 
tion, turning about to go home in deepest 
contrition, but with faint hope of a favorable 
reception; and lo, the moment the father's 
eye discerns him coming, though afar off, all 
his compassions move and he runs forth to 
meet his wandering boy, folds him in his 
arms, and amid all suitable demonstrations 
of joy reinstates him in the home circle. 

This indeed gives us all the elements 
furnished by the other analogies, and shows 
us also the love of God and the thorough 
change in us. Shall we call this the atone- 
ment? Is God a father; the universe a 
great home circle; men a part of the vast 
family in which Christ is the elder brother, 
in whose person God comes to seek and save 
us? We might almost be tempted to think 

68 



The Many-sided Atonement 

it, so vivid, so complete and satisfying does 
this representation appear; as far superior 
to all the pictures that men have drawn, as 
the exquisite colored painting is superior 
to the sketch, the drawing, or the crayon 
picture. But no, it is only the painting 
after all. Christ himself puts it before us 
merely as a parable, a likeness, a picture, 
and not exactly the thing itself. That 
wondrous thing, the great atonement, has 
a length and breadth, a height and a depth, 
that are still unmeasured, and which as far 
exceed all our analogies as the grand pro- 
portions and realities of the mountain itself 
exceed all the meager representations which 
men put on canvas. 

Even the relation of the earthly father 
to the child, although the nearest analogy 
that we can find, is yet but a dim and distant 
representation of God's relation to us. Earth 
has no symbol that can fully set forth that 
mysterious relation and the unsearchable love 
of the absolute Creator to those whom He 
has made in His own image. The universe 
itself contains no forms of thought, no means 
of expression powerful enough to set forth 
all the wealth of meaning hinted at in that 
one word, '' atonement." In all the reaches 
of the coming eternity, the redeemed will be 
ever learning more of that fulness, but ever 

69 



The Reason of Suffering 

more will the great fact itself transcend their 
highest conception, for in it is involved the 
wisdom of the Infinite Mind, and all the 
fathomless grace that fills the heart of Christ, 
and which prompted him to endure the suffer- 
ing by which a world could be redeemed. 



70 



VI 

ETERNAL RETRIBUTIONS ACCORDING 
TO RIGHTEOUSNESS 

It is easily proven that the divine at- 
tributes are not all co-ordinate. Other rela- 
tions than those of equality are found to 
exist. Not all of them appear to have their 
end in themselves. Some, as power, seem 
to be exercised not so much for their own 
sakes as for that of other attributes which 
they uphold and enforce. Not all are in- 
vested with full authority over their own 
exercise. Some, as benevolence, are plainly 
limited in their manifestation by the demands 
of some principle yet more authoritative. 
It is thus broadly manifest that there is upon 
them a law of subordination, and that some 
one of them must be central and sovereign. 
There must be some attribute which has its 
end in itself; to which end all other ends 
are subordinated, and in view of which the 
exercise of all other attributes is restrained 
and limited. 

What this attribute is becomes a question 
of more than speculative interest. It has 
direct and most important practical bear- 

71 



The Reason of Suffering 

ings. Our relations to God are determined 
by His attributes, and our entire spiritual 
attitude toward Him must be affected by 
the view we take of their order and rank. 
If God's power is His central governing 
attribute, then I know that His aim will be 
in all things to illustrate and display that 
power and make it everywhere acknowl- 
edged, and awe and fear must be my most 
acceptable tribute. If wisdom or omniscience 
be central, then no longer need I fear Him 
simply because of His power, because I 
know that His power will be made tributary 
to wisdom, and will be exercised only when 
the latter can thus be the better displayed. 
To show His wisdom, and cause it to be seen 
and admired, will be the ultimate divine aim, 
and I must act accordingly. But if benevo- 
lence (in the sense of natural goodness, 
reluctance to inflict pain and desire to confer 
happiness) be His central dominant attribute, 
then I know that both power and knowledge 
will be made tributary to this, so that all 
fear becomes irrational, and I may seek 
whatever yields me pleasure without appre- 
hension of any ultimate catastrophe. But if 
neither of these is central and sovereign, if 
there is yet a higher than they, to which they 
must accordingly be tributary, then all my 
relations to God must feel the influence of 

72 



Eternal Retributions 

such a fact. If it be true, as our title inti- 
mates, that hoHness is the highest, the central 
governing attribute and glory of God, then 
I know that His ultimate aim will be in all 
things to manifest this, and make it ac- 
knowledged by all His creatures. I know 
now that omnipotence, omniscience and benev- 
olence will each be held in subjection to 
holiness. They will be manifested only when 
their manifestation will help to display holi- 
ness, and otherwise will be held in check. 
I need no longer fear God simply because 
He is omnipotent, but because being om- 
nipotent He is also holy. I can no longer 
take heart simply because He is wise or 
benevolent, but only in so far as with wis- 
dom and benevolence His holiness allows 
me to do so. All my purposes, hopes and 
prospects must now be shaped with prin- 
cipal reference to the holiness of God. 

In favor of this view, that holiness, or 
righteousness, is the central divine attribute, 
the following considerations offer themselves : 

1. ITS DEFINITION 

The sovereignty of holiness seems to be 
involved in its very conception. Holiness 
is moral perfection. It consists in an active 
and passive conformity to the highest moral 
standard, and arises from a conscious, volun- 

73 



The Reason of Suffering 

tary application of the principle or law of 
right to every act, thought, feeling and 
volition. What is this but sovereignty in its 
very exercise? It is nothing less. God is 
holy simply because He subjects every form 
of activity to the principle of holiness. If 
at any point He failed to do this, if any 
impulse whatever were allowed to break 
from this restraint, He would cease to be 
holy. He secures holiness by putting it upon 
the throne, and He retains it only by keeping 
it there. It can exist nowhere else. It 
refuses to live without its crown. To take 
away its sceptre is to destroy it. An un- 
throned holiness is not holiness, but its 
opposite. 

Holiness is in its very nature the supreme 
excellence. All excellence springs from con- 
formity to some ideal or law. The painter, 
the poet, the sage, each seeks it here. They 
strive after the beautiful and the true. But 
what guides their search? An inner law, an 
immutable standard seen by the soul. There 
is an ideal floating always before the mind 
of the artist or sage, and excellence is sought 
in an approach to this fixed standard. But 
the law of right is the highest of all laws and 
all ideals. Its prerogative is to command. 
Authority is of its very essence. It is the 
law of laws, the ideal of ideals, the sova:ieigii 



Eternal Retributions 

principle of the universe. Hence holiness, 
involving conformity to this highest law, is 
the highest excellence. Its inmost formative 
principle is supreme, and its whole nature is 
regal. 

God's holiness is the crown of His per- 
fections, and in some sense peculiar to Him- 
self. The same regal principle is indeed 
the root of the quality whether in God or 
man; but the sphere of its manifestation in 
the former case is, out of measure, higher; 
and both these elements must be taken 
account of. The glory of a ruler is not 
determined simply by knowing his title. 
We must know, also, the extent of the domain 
over which his authority extends. Is he a 
king? Then he is indeed of the first rank; 
but does he rule a continent or an island? 
Kingly authority is always of the same 
quality; but the glory of it will shine out 
more resplendently the broader and wealthier 
the realms over which it extends. The 
splendor of royalty is not so great in the king 
of Dahomey as in the person of the autocrat 
of all the Russias. Holiness is a regal prin- 
ciple wherever it exists. But in the creature 
it rules over finite powers; in God, over 
infinite. In man it appears in the lower 
relations of the subject. In God it shines 
forth in the immeasurably higher relations 

75 



The Reason of Suffering 

of the Sovereign and Judge of infinite worlds. 
The righteousness of the saints is symboHzed 
by garments of Hnen, white and clean; the 
holiness of God by seas of light , firmaments 
of splendor; billowy lakes of consuming, 
retributive flame. It is the very majesty of 
the divine holiness that it has for its subjects 
the infinite attributes of the Godhead. 

2. ITS RELATION TO THE OTHER ATTRIBUTES 

It holds such a relation to the other at- 
tributes that its supremacy seems necessary 
in order to harmony. Several of these at- 
tributes seem to be in conflict. They form 
pairs of opposites or contraries which seem 
mutually to exclude each other. Justice and 
grace (for example), as practical principles, 
seem hostile to each other. Each separately 
can be vividly conceived; but when we at- 
tempt to place them side by side, as active 
principles in the Godhead, a difficult problem 
is presented. For who can be a subject of 
grace but the ill-deserving, the same whom 
justice condemns? The difficulty here, it 
will be observed, is not exactly the govern- 
mental one of reconciling the act of grace with 
the stability of law, but the ulterior difficulty 
of conceiving why a perfectly just sovereign 
should desire or seek to turn aside the penalty 
due. 

76 



Eternal Retributions 

Mercy and wrath furnish a kindred ex- 
ample. Separately there is no difficulty in 
conceiving them; but the moment we view 
them as impulses or sentiments co-existing 
in the mind of God, it would seem that 
they must draw Him in exactly opposite 
directions. For who needs mercy but the 
rebel, the same who is alone the subject of 
wrath ? 

This difficulty has been keenly felt, and, 
as is well known, has driven some to the 
extreme of denying the reality of the one 
or the other of the two contrasted attributes. 
How can a God of perfect love ever be angry ? 
The anger ascribed to Him is only a figure of 
speech. In the last analysis it is merely love 
in disguise. Thus one attribute is made to 
swallow up and annihilate another. On the 
other hand there have not been wanting those 
who have argued that an immutably just God 
could not, on any terms, remit the punishment 
due to guilt, and so have made retributive 
righteousness exclude grace. 

Manifestly there is required the presence 
of some other and higher principle, in the 
sway of which these contraries may be uni- 
fied and reconciled. Holiness considered as 
central meets this demand. Under its sov- 
ereignty every other attribute is under re- 
straint; as it were, is qualified by the same 

77 



The Reason of Suffering 

adjective — holy — and so finds a point 
of union with every other. Holy love and 
holy indignation are perfectly consistent. 
Grace can as legitimately find shelter under 
the wing of holiness as retributive justice. 
These contrasted principles become thus to 
holiness what the stays are to the mast — 
forces that draw in opposite directions, but 
thus the more effectually steady the central 
support. 

It is said that Napoleon's marshals quar- 
relled when he was absent, and ruined the 
campaign; they could not settle who should 
be first. But the moment he appeared on 
the field all acknowledged his higher au- 
thority, and harmony was restored. Apart 
from holiness the other attributes must 
evidently counterwork. Give that the cen- 
tral place, and its sole independent sover- 
eignty brings all into full accord. 

Holiness is so related to the other attributes 
— is so distinct from them yet allied to 
them — that it is able to take up their ener- 
gies into itself and make their separate and 
diverse ends all subservient to its own higher 
end. The rivers of America run eastward 
from the Rocky Mountains, and westward 
from the Alleghanies; yet all at last reach 
the same place of emptying. And this, not 
by keeping ever to their own separate chan- 

78 



Eternal Retributions 

nels, but because a mightier than they — 
*' the father of waters " — flows down athwart 
their courses ; cuts off, betimes, their opposing 
currents; takes up their accumulated waters 
into itself and bears them down to the gulf. 
All the attributes of God, which apart seem 
to be in conflict, are but streams which 
sovereign holiness takes up into itself and 
uses for its own higher end. And as no other 
attribute could be conceived to fulfil this 
office, no other can be allowed to share the 
throne. 

3. THE REPRESENTATIONS OF SCRIPTURE 

The argument from Scripture is indirect 
and inferential, yet by no means of little 
strength. The field, however, is a vast one, 
and can here be only in the briefest manner 
surveyed. Three points of special importance 
may be indicated : 

First. A class of passages seem to present 
the holiness of God as His warrant for the 
exercise of sovereignty, and our chief reason 
for rendering obedience. Thus, when Isaiah 
beheld the Lord exalted as King upon a 
throne high and lifted up, it was His holi- 
ness that appeared to absorb the minds of the 
worshipping cherubs. And thus the 98th 
Psalm dwells on God's holiness with the same 
reference, calling upon the people to praise 

79 



The Reason of Suffering 

God's great and terrible name because it is 
holy, and closing with the exhortation: 
'* Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at 
His holy hill; for the Lord our God is holy." 
If angels and men are under obligation to 
worship and serve God because He is holy, 
then it is holiness which clothes Him with 
sovereignty ; but that which is the source of 
sovereignty must itself be sovereign. 

Secondly. Holiness seems to have been 
made prominent as a matter of revelation. 
The whole system of means by which God 
trained and instructed His ancient people 
seems to have been arranged with special 
reference to this. It was, so to speak, God's 
chief anxiety that this quality of His character 
should be clearly set forth and indelibly 
impressed upon the minds of men. 

The law given at Sinai — Israel's great 
distinction and trust, about which her Proph- 
ets and Psalmists could never say enough — 
was above everything else, an indirect but 
most impressive declaration of God's moral 
perfection. It lays commands on men with 
tones of authority, but the nature of these 
commands — their comprehensiveness, spirit- 
uality, uncompromising strictness, and the 
swift punishment denounced against offenders, 
proclaimed to the world the immutable holi- 
ness of the Sovereign. 

80 



Eternal Retributions 

And so with the ritual added to the law. 
The impressive rites and observances of the 
Levitical code — the endless ceremonies, sac- 
rifices, washings, purgations, restrictions, im- 
posed on the Jews, were expressly declared to 
have had no other point than '* to put a dif- 
ference between the clean and unclean," and 
admonish them that nothing impure could be 
allowed in God's presence. Hence whatever 
had to do with the Temple service must be 
ritually holy, and the most minute and rigid 
directions were given as to what should con- 
stitute this outward symbolic holiness — 
the disregard of any one of which vitiated the 
entire service and exposed the wilful trans- 
gressor to instant death. It will hardly be 
claimed that equal prominence was given to 
any other attribute, and the inference is strong 
that it was thus distinguished because it is in 
fact the chief of all. 

Thirdly. It is made prominent in divine 
titles and ascriptions. Speaking in the first 
person, God seems to claim the title of 
*' holy " as His special and highest preroga- 
tive. He styles Himself " the Holy One,"*' the 
Holy One of Israel," '' the High and Lofty 
One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is 
holy." In like vein all that pertains to Him 
personally is declared to be holy. His name, 
throne, temple; His courts. His worship and 

81 



The Reason of Suffering 

service, the mountain of His house, and 
heaven the place of His peculiar abode, are 
all distinguished by the same high epithet. 
" Holy unto the Lord," was the description 
applied to the priests, to the altar, to the 
offerings and sacrifices, to all the vessels and 
utensils of the sanctuary. And when He 
wishes to confirm His promise by the most 
impressive and solemn oath possible, He 
exclaims: " I have sworn by my holiness, I 
will not lie." Nor is it to be forgotten in 
this connection that this same title has 
become permanently incorporated with the 
name of the Third Person of the Trinity. 

When speaking in their own persons, the 
sacred writers with one consent set forth 
holiness as that in the divine character which 
impressed them as the most sublime, awful 
and glorious. " Who is like unto Thee, 
glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing 
wonders," is the language of the inspired 
Miriam. *' Holy and reverend is His name," 
— " Thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the 
praises of Israel," are samples of David's way 
of speaking. ** Great art thou from ever- 
lasting," says Habakkuk; *' O Lord, my 
God, mine Holy One: Thou art of purer 
eyes than to behold evil and canst not look 
on iniquity." 

" Yea, the heavens," says Eliphaz, " are 

82 



Eternal Retributions 

not clean in His sight; He charges His 
angels with folly." Isaiah is full of sublimity 
in his handling of this theme. '' Great is the 
Holy One of Israel in the midst of thee," He 
exclaims to His suffering people. And again 
foretelling the aim and result of coming 
judgments He declares: " And the Lord of 
Hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and God 
that is holy, shall be sanctified in righteous- 
ness." 

These instances may serve to indicate 
the prevailing style of the sacred writers. It 
is such as everywhere makes prominent the 
divine holiness. The " Trisagion " of the 
cherubs does but give us in an emphatic form 
the constant refrain, so to speak, of the 
ascriptions to God uttered by inspired men. 

No other attribute, it is safe to say, is 
thus distinguished. No other is thus con- 
stantly and emphatically associated with the 
divine majesty. No other could be. The 
incongruity would be manifest in the very 
language that would result. The substitu- 
tion of any other adjective than *holy,' 
and any other noun than * holiness, ' in the 
place of these words would transform and 
degrade the style of the whole Bible. No 
other attribute could bear the strain that 
would come upon it if put in the place given 
to this. And it remains as a kind of primary 

83 



The Reason of Suffering 

fact of Scripture phraseology, that holiness 
holds a pre-eminent position as the center and 
crown of the Divine perfections. 

4. the atonement 

It will be conceded that the sufferings of 
Christ were a necessary condition of human 
salvation. In the language of Scripture, 
" The Son of Man must be delivered into the 
hands of sinful men and be crucified." But 
why this " must," this necessity which could 
in no way be escaped? The answer must be, 
because of the holiness of God. No other 
attribute demanded such a sacrifice. On 
the contrary, some of them made directly 
against it. Could holiness have been left 
out of view, or could its exercise have been 
suspended or limited, the Son of God would 
surely not have been surrendered to the 
agonies of the crucifixion. In what way 
could the immutable sovereignty of holiness 
be more emphatically declared? Through all 
the scenes of the great tragedy it is the 
one attribute that appears to remain in full 
and unrestrained exercise and manifestation. 
Wrath was restrained by the reprieve granted 
even to the murderers of Christ. Love was 
wounded by the sufferings of its most de- 
serving object. Omnipotence was obscured 
in that it was, in some way, hindered from 

84 



Eternal Retributions 

delivering the Son of God from the rage of 
his foes. Even omniscient wisdom seemed 
to pass under a temporary shadow, in that 
the schemes of hell appeared to triumph for 
a moment in the death of the Only Begotten. 
But holiness suffered no eclipse. It shone 
forth uninterruptedly, without diminution or 
obscuration. Never, in fact, was it more 
sublimely and perfectly vindicated; since 
then even the sins which God's mercy would 
pardon were fully expiated by the blood of 
the Great Sufferer. Plainly this attribute 
appears as sovereign, since this alone re- 
mained in undiminished force and unchecked 
exercise. 

Christ in his own person furnishes a 
kind of living illustration of the scope of 
this argument. He was divine. But what 
attribute of divinity, except holiness, did 
he appear to hold fast? He appeared care- 
less of every one of them. He laid them 
aside as circumstances required. He stripped 
himself of them. In the impressive language 
of Paul, he "emptied himself." He con- 
sented to veil his deific powers in flesh, or, 
in other words, to bring their exercise and 
manifestation within the narrow limitations 
of his humanity. Omniscient, he allowed 
the crafty schemes of his enemies to suc- 
ceed. Omnipotent, he suffered himself to 

85 



The Reason of Suffering 

be nailed to the cross — a picture of help- 
lessness heightened in its coloring by the 
satirical jeers of the spectators: "If he be 
the King of Israel, let him come down from 
the cross; he saved others, himself he can- 
not save." Viewmg now this career from 
the human side, we ask why did Christ re- 
strain and lay aside these divine attributes? 
And the answer is, holiness required it. 
Could he have surrendered that even for a 
moment, he might have retained the others; 
he might have confounded his foes and 
shunned the cross. But such were the con- 
ditions under which he acted that at each 
point of his course he must do as he did, 
or stain his purity. The other attributes 
clamored to be heard, but holiness com- 
manded them to be silent. Christ recognized 
the authority of the true sovereign. He 
bowed to holiness. He resisted unto blood 
striving against sin. He became obedient 
unto death, even the death of the cross. At 
the very moment when the other divine at- 
tributes went into darkest eclipse, holiness 
shone forth with brightest rays. We behold 
the other attributes actually bowing down, as 
it were, in token of subjection before holi- 
ness. Christ's humiliation was altogether in 
the interest of this attribute, and hence his 
elevation. Because he humbled himself 

86 



Eternal Retributions 

God exalted him. He enthroned holiness, 
and now holiness enthroned him. Because 
he was holy, harmless, undefiled, and sepa- 
rate from sinners, he was made higher than 
the heavens. The lordship of Christ is the 
incarnation and visible enthronement of the 
holiness of God. 

5. THE GLORY OF GOD 

It is reasonable to suppose, and the 
Scriptures declare, that God in creating and 
governing His worlds has in view His own 
glory. By this, we understand that He so 
orders all things in His universe as to mani- 
fest or display His attributes in their due rank 
and relation. And so it becomes true that 
** the invisible things of Him are understood 
by the things that are made, and the whole 
earth is full of His glory."* Hence if there 
be one attribute which is absolutely su- 
preme — constituting in the highest sense 
His glory — it follows that this attribute 
must be always and everywhere displayed; 
for if at any point this failed to be done, the 
universe at that point would render a false 
report, and would obscure His glory. Which 
one, now, of the divine attributes will bear 
this test? 

It is not power or omnipotence. For 

♦Rom. 1:20; Isa. 6:3. 

87 



The Reason of Suffering 

make this supreme, and what shall we say 
of the manifold, constant and flagrant breaches 
of the proclaimed laws and commands of 
God? If His power is the supreme attribute, 
why, at the vital point of governmental 
authority, is it defied even for a moment? 
These, so numerous breaches of His laws, are 
certainly not illustrations but obscurations 
of His power ; they seem to say to the specta- 
tor that ability is wanting to enforce the law. 
The multiplication of thieves, robbers and 
assassins in any country suggests the weak- 
ness, not the strength, of the executive. The 
same implication is carried by those imper- 
fections, defects and blemishes in nature, of 
which so many meet our eyes. The half- 
finished tower suggests the failure of re- 
sources on the part of the builder. If it were 
God's chief aim to manifest His power, then 
there is partial failure, at least for the present. 
However it may be in the future, it cannot 
now be said that the whole earth is full of 
His glory. 

Again, omniscience or wisdom will not 
bear this test. Make this supreme, and what 
shall be said of the ten thousand instances 
of failure all about us? Seeds that never 
germinate ; flowers nipped in the bud ; crystals 
marred in the forming; animals and the hu- 
man infant perishing from birth? This ap- 

88 



Eternal Retributions 

pearance of waste in the accomplishing of 
certain designs does not suggest infallible 
accuracy in the adjustment of means to 
ends. The builder of a house, who should 
provide at great cost a large amount of 
superfluous material, would be justly sus- 
pected of a lack of foresight. Much more, 
if he should tear down the building when half 
finished, and begin anew on a different 
plan. Yet we read that at one time God saw 
that the wickedness of man was great in the 
earth, and every imagination of the thoughts 
of his heart was only evil continually. And 
it repented the Lord that He had made man 
on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart. 
And the Lord said, " I will destroy man 
whom I have created, from the face of the 
earth; both man and beast, and creeping 
thing, and the fowls of the air; for it re- 
penteth me that I have made them. ' ' Failures 
like these, requiring as it were a revision of 
the original scheme, do not, whatever may 
be said, exhibit and illustrate omniscient 
foresight at the present moment. If God's 
chief aim were to express this attribute, there 
is failure, at least for a time, and the whole 
earth is not now full of His glory. 

Yet again it is only too plainly manifest 
that benevolence will not bear this test. 
The misfortune, misery, suffering and death 

89 



The Reason of Suffering 

that spread a pall of gloom over the earth are 
a sad and conclusive proof of it. These 
things do not express benevolence. On the 
contrary, they seem inconsistent therewith, 
and have not failed to burden the faith of 
many with painful questionings as to the 
steady beneficence of the universal order. 
If it were God's chief aim to manifest and 
display His benevolence, there is at least 
temporary failure. If this be the supreme 
attribute, the chief glory of God, then cer- 
tainly the earth is far enough from being 
full of that glory. 

The like result will be reached by the 
attempt to enthrone any other one of the 
divine attributes save holiness. But make 
this supreme, and suppose it to be God's 
chief and ultimate aim to express and illus- 
trate this quality of His character — as in 
the highest sense His glory — and the whole 
field of view instantly lies in light. 

For holiness is capable of a double mani- 
festation. It has two poles, hatred of sin 
and love of holiness; and hence whatever 
expresses either of these does thereby ex- 
press, manifest, and illustrate holiness itself. 
And the highest, fullest, most impressive 
manifestation of this attribute must involve 
not a single but a double series of symbols. 
There must be two orders or olasees ctf etx- 



Eternal Retributions 

pressions, one exhibiting God's love of holi- 
ness, and the other His hatred of sin. Just 
these two classes and no others are actually 
found. 

All things orderly, beautiful, lovely, at- 
tractive, glorious, are pictures or representa- 
tives of right moral states. They show 
how God looks on these states and quali- 
ties; how they appear in His view, and the 
estimate He sets upon them. God has set 
them in the earth to the very end that they 
may forever express and emphasize His 
love of those qualities. On the other hand 
all things that are distorted, deformed, dark 
and repulsive, are pictures and representa- 
tives of sin. They show how God views it; 
how it looks to Him. He has set them in 
the earth that they may express and em- 
phasize His abhorrence and hatred of moral 
evil. 

Instinctively we know this to be true, 
and the fact is reflected in our most famil- 
iar forms of speech. Whence are the words 
by which we designate good and evil but 
from objects in the natural world? Whence 
such words as clean and unclean; pure and 
impure ; exalted and degraded ; upright, 
grovelling; vile, precious; base, noble, and 
the like, constantly used to describe moral 
qualities, but from what we see in the world 

91 



The Reason of Suffering 

around us? They are all from this source, 
and a truly inexhaustible source we find it. 
There is no conceivable form of human 
virtue but finds its symbol in some object of 
external nature; as innocence in the lamb; 
gentleness in the dove; purity in the un- 
stained snow. And there is no possible form 
of human guilt but has likewise its expres- 
sive picture in some repulsive thing before 
our eyes, as envy in the toad; vice in the 
swine; rage in the tiger; treachery in the 
serpent; impurity and sensuality in the 
trodden mire of the streets. There is nothing 
created in earth or heaven but has a moral 
expressiveness, and serves one of these two 
offices, and thus conspires in the one higher 
office of illustrating the divine holiness. 

And this expression of that holiness, 
when viewed aright, is even overwhelming 
in its impressiveness, and every way worthy 
of its divine author. All that is attrac- 
tive, beautiful, grand and glorious in the 
scenery of earth; in flower and tree; in 
meadow and forest; in lake, stream, ocean, 
mountain, cloud; in everything fair, from 
the violet by the wayside to the floods of 
light that bathe the worlds, is God's smile 
on innocence. While all that is ugly, deformed, 
corrupt, gloomy and terrible, in insect 
and reptile; in desert and wild; in cloud 

92 



Eternal Retributions 

and storm, in fire and flood; in death and 
darkness, is His frown on guilt. The one 
expresses His infinite love of purity, and the 
other His equally infinite hatred of sin; and 
both together set forth and illustrate the 
spotless holiness of His own character, and 
thus the whole earth is seen to be filled with 
His glory. 

With equal ease does this key of holi- 
ness unlock the mystery of human expe- 
rience. All that belongs to our nature as 
It was given to us; all its beautiful affec- 
tions, ready sympathies, generous impulses; 
all its varied and glad activities; all its 
capacities for knowledge and fellowship; all 
the exuberant joy it feels in the presence of 
all God's works, in a word Life in all its 
natural uncorrupted fulness and blessedness, 
offered and secured as the reward of obedience, 
is the symbol of essential holiness, and ex- 
presses God's eternal love of it. While, on 
the other hand, all that is dark in our ex- 
perience, all the corruptions that have crept 
into our hearts; all the base earth-bom 
desires and passions that fester in human 
breasts, all the self-loathing, remorse and 
fear that torture the conscience; all the 
wrong and cruelty and oppression that curse 
society; all the toils and drudgeries of life; 
all the pangs of hunger and thirst, cold and 

93 



The Reason of Suffering 

nakedness, disappointment and bereavement ; 
all the loathsome forms of disease lurking in 
all our veins, and all the pains and dying 
groans of the whole race; all this mighty 
sum of woe which darkens the world and 
makes it a desert even to the redeemed, and 
which is really included in that one word 
of threatening, Death — all this is but a 
symbol of essential sin, and an expression 
of God's eternal loathing and hatred thereof. 
And all the ways and means of grace in the 
work of redemption being aimed at the re- 
storing of men to holiness, do but further 
emphasize God s love of it. 

In a word, looking at the world on its 
bright side, we see the smile with which 
God looks on holiness, — a smile that is 
measured only by the green earth with all 
its gladness, canopied by the blue arch of 
the heavens, radiant with the splendors of 
ten thousand suns. Looking at it on the 
dark side, we see the frown with which He 
looks on sin; a frown whose awfulness is 
only to be expressed by the combined hor- 
rors of natural, social and individual dis- 
order, convulsion, decay and death. 

As thus in a two-fold way God's honor 
is now secured, so will it be forever. No hand 
of the creature, though endowed with the 
largest freedom of choice and action, can ever 

94 



Eternal Retributions 

touch that. Sin, with all the unending 
misery it has brought into the universe, can 
never cast a shadow upon the throne of the 
Most High, nor pluck one ray from the crown 
of His glory. Nay, it is made tributary to 
that glory. The indignation and retribution 
poured out upon it exhibit in a new and most 
impressive form the immutable, uncompro- 
mising holiness of God. Heaven and hell — 
the blessedness of the righteous and the tor- 
ments of the damned — are the two pillars 
upon which reposes in eternal security the 
throne of God's holiness. 

True, God is not indifferent to the choice 
of His creatures. He prefers their submis- 
sion and happiness, not willing {i.e., desir- 
ing) that any should perish, but that all 
should come to repentance. But when any 
refuse to repent, and make the insane choice 
of sin, then in the inexorable doom con- 
dignly inflicted, He will be forever exalted. 
The glory of His holiness is no more truly 
displayed in the beams of love in which 
Gabriel exults, than in the everlasting fire 
prepared for the devil and his angels. In 
the midst of the disorder and woe conse- 
quent on sin, God is able to secure His own 
glory, because holiness is enthroned as His 
central governing attribute. 

But it is time to turn the subject about, 

95 



The Reason op Suffering 

and regarding our proposition as proven, 
apply it to the refutation of errors. If holi- 
ness is sovereign, then all reasoning which 
directly or indirectly ignores this fact, and 
enthrones some other attribute, must be 
fallacious. Unfortunately there has been no 
dearth of such argumentation, and various 
familiar forms of error are really founded 
upon it. The four following are worthy of 
particular attention, showing, as they do, that 
the dethronement of holiness goes hand in 
hand with a denial or under-estimate of the 
great fact of sin. 

(1) Fatalism, — This scheme exalts power. 
Everything must occur according to a fixed 
plan, because God is omnipotent, and it is 
absurd to suppose that any creature could, 
if he wished, thwart at any point the divine 
decrees. Nothing can occur out of the es- 
tablished order. Every act and every event 
has been predestined by the fiats of a resist- 
less will. There is no free-agency in the 
sense of a power to act contrary to that will, 
but only in the sense of a constitutional 
inclination to do, as of choice, what God has 
already determined shall be done. No law 
of God is or can be broken ; He will not per- 
mit it, having power to prevent it. There is 
and can be no transgression. Praise and 
blame are empty conventionalities of speech. 

96 



Eternal Retributions 

Sin is a word without a meaning, a chimera 
of a sickly fancy; there is no such thing. 
And remembering that God is no less wise 
than powerful, we come out to the practical 
dictum of fatalism as expressed in the words 
of Pope, so false to the experience and 
deepest convictions of the race, " Whatever 
is, is right." 

The foundations of this error are reached 
and overthrown the moment we observe 
that holiness and not power is supreme. 
The wrong attribute was put upon the 
throne. Power is a vassal. It has a master. 
It may be limited and restrained in its 
manifestation. In the interest of holiness 
God may moderate and stay its exercise in 
certain relations. He does this. He will not 
employ it forcibly to prevent breaches of His 
law, and so destroy free-agency. He refrains 
from any such exercise of it because He is 
able to handle even sin so as to make it 
redound to His glory. If everything were 
right, finite beings could hardly be made 
aware how holy He is, how earnest is His 
moral feeling. But sin furnishes an occasion 
for a new and peculiar manifestation of 
that feeling. The terrible frown and curse 
with which He overwhelms it reveal what 
else must have remained hidden for want of 
opportunity — God's measureless abhorrence 

97 



The Reason of Suffering 

and hatred of sin, and thus in a new light His 
immutable holiness. Moral free-agency, moral 
government, and moral evil, the three great 
facts around which has raged the conflict of 
ages, become as credible in reason as they 
are undeniable in experience the moment 
there rises to view the correlated fact of the 
sovereignty of the divine holiness. 

(2) Liberalism. — This scheme is closely 
allied to the former. It exalts the divine 
foresight in conjunction with power. It 
admits the existence of defects and imper- 
fections in the present state of things, but 
declares that they are but necessary steps 
to a higher perfection. Hence what is 
called sin is merely a transient deficiency. 
It is not a positive but a negative quality, 
the mere temporary absence of the highest 
good. In a word it is a lower form of good 
on the way to a higher; just as the morn- 
ing twilight is light though still dim, and 
of the same quality as that of the noon into 
which it is sure to grow. Or if reference 
be had to certain unpleasant social aspects 
of evil, then its analogy is the unripe fruit 
whose present bitterness is only a transient 
condition soon to be merged in the whole- 
some sweetness of maturity. Hence this 
theory both admits and denies the existence 
of sin; but the denial is vastly more signifi- 

98 



Eternal Retributions 

cant than the admission. A condition which 
is but a necessary step in a righteous order, 
is as free from blame as is the bursting of 
the seed to set free the sprouting germ. 
And any pain which may be found insepa- 
rable from such a condition must be reckoned 
as tuition chargeable in the school of ex- 
perience, and not at all as penalty due 
under moral government. Indeed, the ad- 
vocates of this theory do not hesitate to 
deny to sin any positive force, and boldly 
declare, though with a qualifying emphasis, 
that there is no such thing as moral evil in 
the universe. 

The fundamental error in this scheme is 
apparent. The foresight of God, though 
backed by power, has no right to the throne. 
It also is a vassal. It may rightly be checked 
in its manifestation by the higher demands 
of holiness. Because the explanation given 
of the existence of evil would honor God's 
foresight, it does not follow that it is the 
true one, for that attribute is not on the 
throne, and is not the one which must at 
every instant be honored. This is the pre- 
rogative of holiness, and sin is made tribu- 
tary thereto, not by viewing it as a mere 
innocent stage of progress, which really 
annihilates it, but by admitting its positive 
guilt and ill-desert and its punishmeiit ac* 

09 



The Reason of Suffering 

cordingly. If God's holiness is supreme, 
then no distinction can be more real or im- 
portant than that between his love of right 
and hatred of wrong, and hence no distinction 
more real and important than that between 
the objects of these opposite divine senti- 
ments. The sin that is hated is not less a 
positive reality than the righteousness that 
is loved. And thus moral distinctions which 
were belittled, and in danger of being alto- 
gether lost sight of, are again seen to be of 
immutable reality and everlasting signifi- 
cance when the sovereignty of holiness is 
kept in view. 

(3) Universalism. — This scheme, as is 
well known, builds on benevolence. The 
argument when formulated stands thus : God 's 
goodness leads Him to desire the happiness 
of all, and His omnipotence enables Him 
to gratify that desire; therefore all will be 
saved. Sin exists and is permitted, but has 
no guilt dark enough to merit more than a 
temporary chastisement. Justice is easily 
satisfied, and benevolence triumphs at last. 
This argument in some form is really the 
basis of the theory, and contains the sub- 
stance of all that is so flippantly said about 
the fatherhood (or as Beecher has it, the 
motherhood) of God, and the assured final 
blessedness of all men as the birthright of 

100 



Eternal Retributions 

nature. But it contains an unproved and 
groundless assumption. It takes silently for 
granted the supremacy of benevolence. For 
if this principle be less than sovereign; if it 
has a superior and a master; if it may be 
checked and limited in its exercise at any 
point by any other attribute — then the 
conclusion loses its certainty. And if this 
limiting attribute chance to be one that 
plainly makes against the salvation of some, 
then the conclusion becomes not only un- 
certain, but positively improbable. Yet this 
is precisely what we have found to be true. 
Benevolence must yield to holiness. The 
latter is chief ; the former is vassal. And God 
no more gives unlimited play to His goodness 
than to His wrath. There is a higher than 
either to which both are held in strictest sub- 
jection, and the theory which ignores this 
fact is baseless. 

The servant who should flatter himself 
that he should inherit his master's estate, 
forgetting the higher claims of that mas- 
ter's son, would be doomed to disappoint- 
ment. His master's regard for him might 
be great; but this can be no ground for 
hope in the presence of that immeasurably 
higher regard which he feels for his own 
offspring. God's regard for the ends of 
benevolence is great and most real; but 

101 



The Reason of Suffering 

not so great by a transcendent measure as 
is His regard for the supreme ends of holi- 
ness. The reasoning that founds on the 
former, but overlooks the latter, can only 
mislead. The fabric of Universalism falls, 
bereft of its chief support; and sin again 
appears in the dread form of a measureless ill- 
desert, the moment the sovereignty of holi- 
ness is seen and acknowledged. 

(4) Restorationism. — This theory coin- 
cides in important respects with Universal- 
ism. There are, however, important dif- 
ferences. In its older form Universalism 
held the immediate entrance of every man 
at death upon the full blessedness of heaven. 
This was not inaptly called '' the death and 
glory scheme." This crude theory has been 
so far modified as to make provision for an 
intermediate state of training and growth of 
indefinite length. Still this intermediate state 
is apt to be looked upon as an advance 
every way upon the present. Whatever 
may be before us, the worst both of sin and 
suffering is over before death, and the way 
brightens as it stretches on. A plunge into 
a darker world than this, and into a state 
where the element of retribution prepon- 
derates, or is even for a time left in sole 
possession of the field, it would be loth to 
admit. But just this plunge Restorationism 

102 



Eternal Retributions 

admits and asserts for some, and that with 
the most appalling allowances as to dura- 
tion. In a word, it allows perdition, but 
expects salvation beyond it. It admits a 
hell, but finds through it a pathway to 
heaven. 

Differing thus from Universalism in its 
outlook into the future, we find a corre- 
sponding difference in the line of argument 
employed. It makes much of benevolence, 
no doubt, but the attribute it really en- 
thrones is (as in the case of Liberalism, 
though in a different way) the divine wisdom. 
Sin exists; it is exceedingly heinous; the 
punishment awaiting it unrepented here is 
awful beyond conception both in nature 
and duration. But there is no eternity 
of such punishment. Sin is not a permanent 
fact in the universe. Such an admission 
would impeach God's wisdom, which is far- 
reaching, and sooner or later must prevail 
to sweep away all evil, and turn every winter 
into spring. 

This argument is a specious one. It ap- 
peals strongly to our natural desire to see 
a full- orbed completeness in the coming 
kingdom of God. Apart from any supposed 
logical force, it has for many minds a kind 
of fascination not easily resisted. Yet its 
unsoundness is not the less manifest. Holi- 

103 



The Reason of Suffering 

ness is on the throne, and omniscience is 
tributary. The presence of sin under God's 
frown does not obscure holiness, but dis- 
plays afresh its sovereign majesty. The 
glory of God does not require that sin, having 
come into existence through no fault of His, 
should ever be wholly expunged, as would 
be the case if wisdom were supreme. On the 
contrary there would in some sense be a loss, 
since one possible expression and exercise 
of holiness would be done away. The su- 
preme glory of God, to be vindicated at all, 
must be vindicated at every moment. The 
theory in question not only identifies that 
supreme glory with the wrong attribute, but 
contains the fatal admission that it is, and 
is to be for untold ages, in dark eclipse. The 
enthronement of holiness shows us that 
glory vindicated at each moment in a way 
that can never be outworn. The problem 
once solved is solved forever. The difficulty 
offered by the presence of evil is the same for 
an hour, an age, an eternity. God in the 
majesty of His holiness is able to handle sin 
in another and higher way than by annihila- 
ting it. The Romans did not slay their 
captured enemies but made them their ser- 
vants. The first would indeed have dis- 
posed of them; but the second turned them 
to practical account. Sin is God's foe. He 

104 



Eternal Retributions 

does not annihilate it. His glory does not 
require this, but is even more impressively 
promoted by the ever present opportunity of 
displaying His holiness in the special form of 
condign retribution. 

Hence the pillars of Restorationism, as 
of every unscriptural theory of the divine 
government, are torn away. We find room, 
consistently with God's glory, for free-agency; 
for moral government; for the presence of 
sin ; for an ill-desert that is measureless ; and 
for a guilt that abides under due penalty for- 
ever, when we observe that the holiness of 
God occupies the throne as central and 
supreme. 



105 



VII 
ELEMENTS OF A TRUE MANHOOD 

True manhood is none other than Chris- 
tian manhood. It was not in vain that the 
founder of Christianity was called " the 
Son of man. ' ' This title implied that in him 
was presented the fairest type of an ideal 
humanity. Ages have rolled, and yet this 
claim has never been successfully impugned. 
Any attempted enumeration of manly quali- 
ties that overlooks this supreme example 
must stand convicted of folly at the bar of 
reason, and if he had left on record such an 
enumeration it surely would have been of 
priceless value. 

He has not done this; but one of his 
followers has done it — and that the one 
who perhaps was better able than any other 
to perform such a service. With a point 
and brevity altogether characteristic the great 
apostle to the Gentiles wrote to his friends, 
*" Quit you like men": and he particular- 
izes by exhorting them at the same time to 
** watch," to '' stand fast," to *' be strong," 
and do all things in a spirit of " love/' or^ 

*ICar. 16:13. 14. 

106 



Elements of a True Manhood 

as the word might be paraphrased, unselfish 
benevolence. 

Assuming now the apostle's point of 
view as addressing those who are honestly 
seeking to become real men after the pattern 
of his Master, we can hardly fail to find here 
a sufficiently complete outline of the ele- 
ments of a true manhood. 

At the outset it is evident that no one can 
measure up to such a standard that does not 
possess positive virtues. To do so he must 
be not merely '' good " but good for some- 
thing. 

And yet there are some who seem to think 
that duty is summed in a series of pro- 
hibitions. They view it as a check, an 
external law hemming them in and keeping 
them back from vice and transgression. 
Their religion is negative, a mere abstinence 
from wrong doing. The thought of achieve- 
ment, of positive efficient work for humanity, 
seems never to have occurred to them. They 
are only anxious to escape blame. If they 
do no harm they are satisfied. Their highest 
idea and conception of duty appears to be 
to avoid injuring any one. 

Plainly this is a most inadequate and 
childish conception of Christian discipleship. 
The Gospel is no negation. Religion, as 
Christ taught it, is of all things most positive. 

107 



The Reason of Suffering 

Activity of the most aggressive order is its 
very substance and law. Jesus himself 
names it * * life ' ' ; that is a living, active prin- 
ciple ; in a word, a power which from its very 
nature must make itself felt. Christ did not 
come to utter prohibitions. There is noth- 
ing negative in his teachings; they are all 
of a positive order. It was not his mission 
to hem men in by a code of restrictions and 
thus fence them off from positive wrong 
doing merely. This was a work already 
accomplished. This was Judaism. This is 
religion in its childish state. Childhood is, 
in large measure, negative. 

It is enough for the child to be under 
restraint, so that he do no harm and receive 
none. Positive, serviceable effort is not 
expected of him as yet, for he is not capable 
of it. 

Not so with the man. He must achieve. 
He must do something, not merely not do 
something. The spirit of manhood is that of 
achievement, of earnest, positive, fruitful 
effort. This is the distinctive mark and glory 
of manhood, that it is conscious of the will 
and the power to achieve. Childhood has it 
not. It is content with a comfortable in- 
efficiency. But the moment this loftier 
purpose springs up in the breast and thrusts 
aside the play impulse of babyhood, that 

108 



Elements of a True Manhood 

moment, and not before, the child becomes 
the man. 

Hence the coming of Christ marks the 
transition from the childhood to the manhood 
of the church. Christianity was an advance 
on Judaism simply because of its more 
positive character. It consists not so much 
in not doing evil, as in positively doing good. 
It calls on men not so much to stop acting as 
to act; not directly to check and restrain 
the life they are now pursuing, but rather to 
take up another and higher life of which they 
as yet know little. Thus religion, which was 
before merely a wall of defence, becomes a 
mighty, aggressive and conquering power. 
Judaism was a check; the Gospel is an 
impulse. Judaism was a law; the Gospel is 
life. Judaism was a negation ; but the Gospel 
is a power and an inspiration. Christ did not 
come as a schoolmaster to train men like 
children, for this the law had already done. 
He came as the mighty Prophet of the ages 
whose clarion voice should wake up the 
world to a new and sublime consciousness of 
spiritual manhood. 

Hence the new charter given to the church 
to disciple all nations, in utter contrast to 
the ancient law. The Jews were not to 
mingle with outsiders for fear of pollution. 
The Christian church is commanded to go 

109 



The Reason of Suffering 

everywhere preaching the gospel. The Jews 
were to remain on the defensive shut up in 
their own borders. The disciples of Jesus 
hold a commission to march forth and con- 
quer the world. We are told that in some 
of our cities a mother sometimes locks up 
her children at home for safekeeping while 
she herself goes out to her day of toil. The 
Jews were like those children, locked up for 
safekeeping in their exclusive legal system; 
while that mother symbolizes the Christian 
church going forth to her work and labor of 
love. And there are all too many professed 
disciples today whom their good mother the 
church has to lock up under restrictive dis- 
cipline as the best she can do, whereas they 
ought to be rendering her manly, efficient 
service. 

There is really no such thing as a negative 
Christian. The term contradicts itself. In 
order to be a Christian properly speaking it 
is not enough to do no harm. All this is 
below the mark. Positive well-doing, con- 
secrated effort, real achievement in benevo- 
lent work, is the true title to Christian dis- 
cipleship. 

It is a great mistake, though a common 
one, to suppose that he is the best Christian 
who has fewest faults. This is not the 
standard. It is well if a man be free from 

110 



Elements of a True Manhood 

faults, but the other question of far greater 
moment is has he any virtues? It is the 
positive rather than the negative side of 
character that settles the question of man- 
hood. It is so in secular matters. Energy, 
force, enterprise are the qualities which 
secure the respect of society. Where these 
are exhibited a few faults are readily par- 
doned; but no negative qualities will save a 
man's reputation if he is lazy. Shiftlessness 
can never be respected; however blameless 
a person may be if he is inefficient the verdict 
is that he is not much of a man. And it is a 
true verdict; and just as true in religious as 
in secular matters. Spiritual shiftlessness is 
no more respectable than any other species; 
and that church in New Jersey which ex- 
pelled a member for '' general worthless- 
ness " did a perfectly proper and justifiable 
act. 

The Bible everywhere lays stress on the 
manly, positive virtues. The men God has 
especially honored have seldom been of the 
faultless type. They generally had great 
faults ; but they had energy, zeal, enthusiasm 
for the cause of God, and He accepted them. 
David, for example, had his faults. He 
often erred, and sometimes grievously; but 
he had courage and enthusiasm. He was 
aUve to the honor of God. He was ready to 

111 



The Reason of Suffering 

take his life in his hand and go out and meet 
Goliath, or to suffer anything for the good 
of the people, and God set him on the throne. 
But the dwellers at Meroz, who sat still in 
their harmless inefficiency, were given up to 
the curse. 

And here appears the folly of those who 
are always spying out the faults of their 
brethren, and who hasten to set a mark of 
reprobation upon everyone in whom they 
can discover any defect. On this ground who 
of us is safe? We all have faults, more or 
less conspicuous. We are like a barrel of 
apples in the spring; they are all specked. 
Yet the prudent housekeeper does not reject 
them on this account. She thinks more 
about the sound part than the decayed, and 
makes excellent use of them in her cuisine. 
And so it behooves us to overlook in a Chris- 
tian spirit the faults of our brethren, and 
take special notice of their positively good 
qualities. Thus will they be encouraged to 
render the service of which they are really 
capable, and the body of Christ will be 
strengthened. It is the positive service which 
men render, not the number of the charges 
to which they can plead " Not guilty," that 
makes them of worth in the kingdom of God. 
*' A living dog is better than a dead lion "; 
and the faultiest of Christians who has 

112 



Elements of a True Manhood 

energy and zeal is worth more to the church 
than the most impeccable of spiritual slug- 
gards. 

Another very important quality may be 
indicated by the phrase, independence in 
service. 

" Be strong " is Paul's way of putting it, 
evidently meaning, '* show yourselves strong 
individually; able to stand up on your feet 
and maintain your post independently of the 
action of others." This is the part of men, 
not of children. Children work well only 
in the company of older persons. They need 
the example and influence of others to keep 
them steadily to a task. They have not the 
character and strength of will to act inde- 
pendently of those around them. Men on 
the contrary are expected to have independ- 
ence of character. It belongs to their age to 
have views and aims of their own — to have 
a decided and definite purpose which they 
are able to follow out independently of their 
neighbors. Christian manliness requires that 
every man stand up squarely on his own 
feet, and do the work of God, whether others 
do it or not. Depending on others for strength 
and inspiration is spiritual childishness. Send 
out a boy into the fields to work alone and 
he will probably waste his time. The birds 
and the butterflies will get more of his at- 

113 



The Reason of Suffering 

tention than the hoe and the spade. Send 
out a man, and you expect the same amount 
and quality of work as if you were yourself 
present to oversee the matter. Independence 
in fidelity and action belongs to the manly 
age. Nowhere is this quality more requisite 
and admirable than in Christian work. It 
was well exemplified in Harlan Page who 
recorded the resolution as the settled rule of 
his life, that he would not wait for others, but 
would labor for the salvation of men pre- 
cisely as if he were the only one to do the 
work. This was a true Christian independ- 
ence; and it made him a power as it will 
any man. It is the indispensable condition 
of leadership. He who can stand up firmly 
on his own feet, doing his duty, whether 
others do theirs or not, will always exert a 
powerful influence. Men follow such. They 
will follow no others. It results from the 
nature of the case that they will not. We 
lean for support on the strong oak that 
holds fast by its own root ; not on the yielding 
vine which must itself be supported. And 
if as disciples of Christ we would fulfill our 
mission as spiritual leaders of society and 
** quit ourselves like men " we must possess 
and exercise a true Christian independence. 

Many seem woefully destitute of this 
quality; they wait for others. Their move- 

114 



Elements of a True Manhood 

ments depend on those of other people. A 
consciousness of their own, separate, individual 
responsibility seems never to have dawned 
upon them. Instead of acting, they wait to 
be acted upon. Instead of driving a team of 
their own, they do (as the boys do sometimes) 
hitch their little wagon to some other man's 
chariot and trundle along behind. When 
others work they work. They go to the 
prayer-meeting when everybody goes; and 
help carry it on when that is the fashion. 
But when others stop, they stop. When 
their neighbors stay at home, they do like- 
wise. When brother Jones and sister Brown 
sit silent in meeting their lips are hermetically 
sealed. As if my neighbor's failure in duty 
lessened my obligations ! Or as if when others 
are false to duty that were a graceful mo- 
ment for me to prove recreant ! It is a maxim 
that ** a friend in need is a friend indeed "; 
but what sort of friends are those who desert 
their Lord at the very moment when, if 
ever, he has most need of them? 

Behold the Savior saying to the twelve, 
just after a large number had deserted him, 
*' Will ye also go away? " Noble was the 
response '* To whom shall we go? We will 
not go." But this class of disciples say by 
their acts: ''Yes, Lord, of course we shall 
run when the rest do." Such §aldiers cer- 

116 



The Reason of Suffering 

tainly do not quit themselves like men. And 
the service they render at any time is hardly 
worth the urging it costs to secure it. They 
are like Grant's demoralized troops on the 
peninsula: It took about as many faithful 
soldiers stationed in the rear to keep them 
from running away. Mothers are sometimes 
heard to say that they would rather do all 
the work of the family themselves than try 
to make the children help. A graphic pic- 
ture of many a church where a few leaders do 
all the work and bear all the burdens, because 
they find it easier to do it alone than to get 
the rank and file to do their duty. Such 
persons are like the farmer's scythe when the 
steel is worn off. It is more trouble to keep 
it sharp than it is worth. He grinds it, and 
whets it, and it seems to have a good edge, 
but it does not last. A few strokes and it is 
as dull as ever. And so he grinds and whets, 
till in utter despair he gives it up as a bad 
job — a not inaccurate representation of 
many a leader in Zion in his attempts to 
secure active fidelity from church members. 
It is to this class Paul would say, " Be inde- 
pendent, be men. Cease this childish habit of 
comparing and measuring yourselves by others 
and have a purpose and life of your own. 
Be not mere parasites which feed only on the 
sap of other plants. Be like the oak which 

116 



Elements of a True Manhood 

has a root and stalk of its own." Instead of 
looking at one another let each look up to the 
Master of us all and do his own duty like a 
man. *' Let every man prove his own work," 
says another Scripture, *' and then shall he 
have rejoicing in himself alone and not in 
another; for every man shall bear his own 
burden." 

Another very important element is stead- 
fastness. 

"Stand fast in the faith," are the apostle's 
words; that is have no fickleness, no waver- 
ing. This too is a manly trait. Children are 
creatures of impulse. They are moved always 
by the emotion or feeling that happens to be 
uppermost ; and it is not expected that they 
can always be relied upon. But it belongs 
to man's estate that he should have prin- 
ciples and act upon them, and that with 
constancy. Children may be permitted to 
plead their tastes and distastes and object to 
doing a thing because they do not like it. 
Men, however, are not allowed this weakness. 
They are expected to do what their principles 
require whether they feel like it or not at a 
given moment. They must be steadfast in 
their purposes and in the discharge of their 
trusts. 

And if there be anything unmanly it is 
when a person practically deserts his prin- 

117 



The Reason of Suffering 

ciples so soon as they begin to cost him some- 
thing; withdraws his support, ceases to 
advocate them, perhaps gives his influence 
against them, the moment the popular current 
sets the other way. Yet what else is it when 
we hear people plead their likes and dis- 
likes as an excuse from what they know to 
be duty: Those people, for example, who 
stay away from church because they do not 
like the minister ; as if he were the object of 
worship ! and never come to prayer-meeting 
unless they feel sure that it is going to be 
interesting; as if a meeting would ever be 
interesting if everybody waited for somebody 
else to make it so: Or those other people 
who always run with the crowd, follow the 
latest novelty, and shout in unison with 
the largest chorus — fair-weather friends, 
mere go-betweens, always eager to share the 
booty but sure to run when the battle begins. 

What would you say of a hired man who 
shirked all the work and made his appearance 
only at meal time? Especially, what would 
you think if you found he was doing the like 
by half a dozen men at the same time ; hap- 
pening in at the hour of leisure and feasting 
but making himself scarce at the time of 
labor? 

It is necessary no doubt that every kite 
should have a tail but it is not the most 

118 



Elements of a True Manhood 

important part of the arrangement. It is 
more honorable to be in the framework, and 
far more honorable to stay in the framework 
of one than to figure successively in the tails 
of a dozen. Better be a planet keeping con- 
stantly to its regular orbit than a vapory 
comet wandering all over the heavens. Better 
be steadfast, keeping the post God has as- 
signed us like men, whether it happens to be 
in the fashion or out of the fashion. It is the 
immovable guide-post pointing always the 
same way that saves the lost traveller, not 
the weather-vane that merely whirls with 
the wind. 

The whole truth is that practical fidelity 
to our principles is not only becoming but is 
the only condition upon which we can really 
have any principles. Principles refuse the 
wooing of any but earnest suitors. They 
refuse to be mistresses, to be picked up and 
cast off at will. They must be taken, if at 
all, as men used to take their wives, for better 
or worse. And he who has not resolved to 
cling to his principles in evil report as well as 
in good will soon find that he really has none 
at all. 

He might as well have none. To accept 
a principle with the proviso that it is for fair 
weather only, is making sure of defection 
beforehand. It is like marrying a woman on 

119 



The Reason of Suffering 

condition that she shall never grow old. 
The trying time is sure to come. No truth is 
always popular ; no set of principles is always 
in the ascendant. There are ups and downs 
to every road, and when we accept a prin- 
ciple it should be because we believe that it 
is right, and hence to be adhered to through 
all vicissitudes however unexpected. 

It is just these sudden, unexpected trials 
that furnish the real test and reveal whether 
we have actually accepted the principle or 
are only dallying with it. The question of 
cost is the decisive one. Chaffering with a 
pedlar about a sewing machine, for example, 
is not buying it. You may have it in your 
possession, take it to your home, keep it on 
trial for a time, and unobservant persons 
may suppose that you have bought it. But 
you have not done so if the question of cost 
has not been settled. Quite likely when 
the price is announced you find it more than 
you feel disposed to pay and part with the 
machine, though you really had some thought 
of buying it. So what men call their prin- 
ciples are often too loosely held to be theirs, 
and the moment the cost becomes apparent 
they are undeceived. 

It was thus with Demas. He did not 
know at the outset how much discipleship 
would cost him. He did not see what a 

120 



Elements of a True Manhood 

thorough sweep of his worldly schemes it 
was sure to make, and he no doubt thought 
himself sincere. But when the trial came he 
clung to the world and forsook Christ; he 
really never had Christian principles. The 
church at Philadelphia too was ignorant of 
how much sorrow, persecution and trial 
their Christianity would cost; but when 
these things came upon them, they, on the 
contrary, did not flinch but faced them like 
men, and thus won the express recognition 
and commendation of their Lord. 

What more pitiable object is there than 
a man without steadfastness, with no settled 
principles? He is like a ship without a 
rudder. She spreads her sails to catch the 
breeze, but unfortunately it keeps shifting 
and instead of making port she beats back 
and forth upon the waves until wrecked on 
some hidden rock. This was the figure 
Paul seemed to have in mind when he ex- 
claimed, ** Be no longer children, tossed 
to and fro and carried about with every 
wind of doctrine by the sleight of men," 
but '* watch ye, stand fast in the faith," and 
" quit you like men." 

Still another very important element is 
thoughtjulness. 

" Watch ye," says Paul; *' exercise fore- 
thought, as is the part of men." The manly 

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The Reason of Suffering 

age is the age of reflection. Thoughtlessness 
and improvidence can only be pardoned to 
the inexperience of childhood. 

In a man of full age it becomes a culpable 
and disgraceful childishness. Think for a 
moment of the amount of earnest, careful 
thought necessary for the successful prosecu- 
tion of any of the ordinary forms of business. 
What care, what attention, what constant 
regard not only to larger matters but to 
numberless details! What accurate calcu- 
lating, what shrewd guessing, what sharp 
insight into human nature, what knowledge 
of men and things! As a result, what quick- 
ness and readiness of thought we see in all 
prosperous men of affairs. How constantly 
is the intellect kept on the stretch and har- 
nessed to the work in hand ! How notorious 
the fact that the prime requisite to success in 
secular business is an active and trained 
intellect ! 

Can we doubt that if the same earnest 
thought were exercised in spiritual things 
the cause of truth would be much more 
rapidly promoted than it is? If Christians 
were as thoughtful in religious as in secular 
matters, as careful to look ahead and forecast 
results; as anxious to forestall trouble; as 
quick to see and embrace opportunities, as 
skillful in adapting means to ends , think you 

122 



Elements of a True Manhood 

we should have scanty congregations, de- 
serted prayer-meetings, poor singing, diill, 
lifeless services, and prayers half an hour 
long? Think you there would be jealousies 
and rivalries and bickerings if time were 
taken to think of the utterly withering effect 
upon Zion's prosperity such spectacles are 
sure to have? 

Verily " the children of this world are 
wiser in their generation than the children of 
light." It is all too plain that there is a 
great defect at this point. Would a man 
with as little forethought as most Christians 
exhibit in spiritual matters succeed in any 
kind of business? He would be bankrupt in 
six months. We often wonder at the slow 
progress of the Gospel. There is little cause. 
As things are, the wonder is not that so little 
but that anything is accomplished. " These 
things ought not so to be." We ought to 
quit ourselves like men. God expects the 
service of all our powers. We ought to serve 
him with the intellect as truly as with the 
affections. We say much about bringing the 
heart to the altar; this is well; but let us 
not forget the head. Consecrated brain is an 
excellent offering, and an indispensable ele- 
ment in successful Christian work. 

Men eminent in the kingdom of God have 
always been of the thoughtful type. Jacob 

123 



The Reason of Suffering 

was a man who reflected deeply on religious 
themes, else had he never won the birth- 
right or escaped the wrath of his brother. 
Joseph's career gives evidence of a habit of 
most careful attention, as seen in his manage- 
ment of his wayward brethren. David medi- 
tated day and night in God's law, and managed 
all the vast affairs of his kingdom in the 
interest of Jehovah's cause. It was Paul's 
constant, absorbing study how to adapt him- 
self to the needs of every class. How to 
become a Jew to the Jews, a Gentile to the 
Gentiles, weak to those who were weak — 
all things to all men, that he might by all 
means save some. In his own language, 
** he meditated, reflected on these things, 
gave himself wholly to them, brought every 
thought into captivity to the obedience of 
Christ," and thence resulted his matchless 
power and unequalled success as a winner of 
souls. 

Finally there is the crowning quality of 
self-forgetfulness. 

Paul's words are, ** Let all your acts be 
done in love,'* that is, in a spirit of self- 
forgetful benevolence. This is pre-eminently 
a manly virtue. The childish age is one of 
dependence. The child must receive care 
and support, not render it. We expect 
children to make known their wants and seek 

124 



Elements of a True Manhood 

attention. In the nature of the case they 
appear as self-seekers; as those demanding, 
at the hands of others, the object of their 
desires. And because of their weakness and 
dependence this in them is not to be blamed ; 
but the transition from childhood to man- 
hood involves a complete reversal of this order. 
The man is expected to do something for 
others rather than expect something from 
them. Weakness has passed; strength has 
come; and it is a shame for him now to be 
a burden. On the contrary he is expected 
to pay up the debt already incurred, and 
render the support which he formerly re- 
ceived. The helpless period is passed, the 
helpful period has come. He is no longer to 
be served, but to serve, no longer to be 
ministered unto but to minister. He has 
passed to a higher stage. The consumer has 
become a producer; the receiver has become 
a giver; the beneficiary has become a bene- 
factor ; the beggar and solicitor of favors has 
become an almoner and conferrer of benefits. 
In a word he is supposed to have outgrown 
the little self which once absorbed his thoughts, 
to have risen out of and above it; to have 
left it behind, lost sight of and forgotten it 
in the nobler office of bestowing blessings on 
others. 

Such, in the order of nature, is the manly 

125 



The Reason of Suffering 

spirit. It is so acknowledged. Generous 
unselfishness is manly. Helpfulness is manly, 
and the reverse unmanly. Such confessedly, 
by general, spontaneous acknowledgment on 
all hands, is the type of manhood. Yet, how 
rare is the realization of this type; how few 
manly men there are! How few who, what- 
ever their exterior, actually possess the noble 
spirit of manly self-forgetfulness ! How clear 
that the vast majority of men today are more 
or less selfish, striving to get, not to give, to 
be gratified, not to confer benefits. They are 
overgrown children clamoring for sweetmeats ; 
great babies, whom their amiable nurse, so- 
ciety, is expected to fix up with bib and 
tucker and feed with a spoon ! 

The pleasure-seeker is not a man. He is 
simply a lubberly urchin crying for candy. 
The money-getter, the place-hunter, the fame- 
seeker, are not men. They are merely pettish 
children who have to be hired, flattered and 
cajoled to keep them in good humor. Only 
those are true men who rise clear out of these 
swaddling bands of littleness and forget self 
in something nobler. Howard, visiting the 
dungeons of Europe to rescue the unfortunate, 
was a man. Luther, risking his life for the 
spiritual safety of his people, was a man. 
Paul, glorying in labors and sufferings for 
the church, was a man. And Jesus dying for 

126 



Elements of a True Manhood 

the world was a man. He was the perfect 
man, the only perfect man ; and he was such 
for the reason that he possessed in full 
measure the spirit of manhood, the unselfish 
spirit, and perfectly obeyed it. 

He was really the first man. Till he 
appeared, the true standard of manhood was 
not yet revealed. The whole race was in a 
childish state, and had not even the concep- 
tion of a perfect manhood. And since his 
advent matters have not grown much better 
in the world at large; but in the church, 
composed of his avowed followers and imi- 
tators, we certainly ought to find a better 
state of things. Here at least the manly 
spirit of self- forgetful benevolence ought to 
bear sway. 

Sometimes we see things that seem to look 
the other way. Sometimes we see jealousies ; 
but why be jealous of another if we are seek- 
ing his good? Sometimes we see envy and 
rivalry; but why are we envious and am- 
bitious if we are aiming only to do good, 
and not to get place or notice? Sometimes 
we hear of backbiting, evil-speaking, dep- 
recatory remarks and harsh criticising. Are 
these the tokens of a pure, manly desire to 
benefit our brethren? Sometimes we hear 
complainings of having to bear too great a 
share of the burdens. But if one's aim is to 

127 



The Reason op Suffering 

bear burdens, ought not his rejoicing to be 
greater the more God enables and permits 
him to do? Sometimes we see contentions; 
but how is it possible that those who are 
aiming to help each other should be found 
tearing each other? 

Manifestly the elements of a true man- 
hood cannot be won without some trials. 
Paul, whose words we have studied, did not 
fail to practice the principles which he 
enjoined upon others; and he found that 
there was " hardness " to be endured, like 
that of " a good soldier" as will appear when 
we contemplate his own career in the section 
which follows. 



128 



VIII 

PAUL; AN EXEMPLAR OF TRUE 
MANHOOD 

What marvellous energies are sometimes 
treasured up in the soul of a great man ! No 
movements in history are vaster or more 
sublime than those accomplished when such 
energies are called into action. 

A little more than a hundred years ago, 
for example, there was a most critical period 
in the history of Europe. The people of 
France, groaning under ages of oppression, 
had risen up in the rage of a sublime despair, 
and careless of fortune, of blood and of life, 
had driven out their oppressors and raised 
the banner of freedom. No more righteous 
revolution was ever attempted; and though 
crimes stained it, let us not forget the thousand 
years of iminterrupted crime which had pro- 
voked it. 

Europe's despots took the alarm. They 
feared the contagion of such an example. 
They felt their worm-eaten thrones totter 
upon their bases. Banding their forces they 
marched forth determined to quench the 
rising flame of liberty in the blood of its 
defenders. 

129 



The Reason of Suffering 

It was a fearful hour. It seemed as if 
the people's cause, triumphant for a mo- 
ment, must sink under an irresistible attack 
and be buried forever. 

The frontiers of the young republic blazed 
with camp fires and shook to the tread of 
embattled hosts. The French fought like 
tigers and died like heroes; but what could 
they do against banded Europe? Devotion 
was wasted, valor was vain, and even victory 
piled on victory availed not against the 
ever replenished hosts of their outnumber- 
ing foes. They were forced back, and the 
fiery circle closed in upon them ever nearer 
the point of hopeless resistance; and the 
soldiers of liberty, weakened and decimated 
by their very victories, were reduced to a 
wretched handful hiding amid Alpine snows, 
where the world looked hourly for their utter 
destruction. 

What then was the wonder, the speech- 
less astonishment of the whole civilized 
world to see them suddenly rise as if at a 
trumpet call from heaven, and in defiance 
of all rules, and all military probabilities, 
rush upon their foes like vultures upon flocks 
of doves, and by such unheard of expedients, 
such daring deeds, such skilful combinations 
as transcended all conjecture, actually over- 
whelm their countless enemies, and in fifteen 

130 



Paul; an Exemplar of True Manhood 

years lay all Europe submissive at their 
feet ! 

And what should be our wonder to be 
told that it all resulted from the might and 
genius of a single man! When all Europe 
was loaded in one scale against popular 
rights, God in His providence (which uses 
even worldly men to accomplish its pur- 
poses) dropped a Bonaparte into the other 
scale, and Europe was outweighed. All human 
calculations were baffled by the tremendous 
energies treasured up in that single soul, 
and the revolution was saved. 

But this crisis was rooted in another that 
had arisen three centuries earlier. Then all 
Europe had fallen under a despotism not only 
of force but of superstition and force com- 
bined. Never since the sinning angels were 
cast down out of heaven, perhaps, had there 
been such a satanic conjunction of both the 
political and ecclesiastical powers to grind the 
multitude in the dust. 

Fraud and priestcraft on the one hand, 
joined forces with pride and kingcraft on the 
other, to enslave both the minds and the 
bodies of the wretched, plundered, poverty- 
stricken masses. It was not only dangerous 
to rebel against this double despotism by an 
overt act, but it was death even to whisper 
a complaint against it. Even princes and 

lai 



The Reason of Suffering 

nobles bowed their heads in the dust to 
escape the scathing lightning of the papal 
anathema. Nothing seemed more improbable 
or even impossible than that this iron yoke, 
wrought at Satan's smithy, should ever be 
broken. 

Yet it was broken as suddenly as if an 
archangel had put his hand to the work. 
When the tremendous energies that lay 
dormant in the soul of the monk Luther, 
under the impulse of the Holy Spirit, rushed 
forth to action, in flashing insight, deep con- 
viction, unconquerable faith, and in irre- 
sistible argument, protest, sarcasm and de- 
nunciation, the stagnant sea of social apathy 
and despair was set boiling as if a burning 
volcano had been cast into it, and in twenty- 
five years the face of Europe was changed. 

With king and pope, monk and cardinal, 
fraud and satanic corruption in one scale, 
God had outweighed them all by casting 
into the other scale the measureless energies 
of a single great soul. 

Is it possible that these two mighty 
epochs, the earlier of which prepared the 
way for the later, were themselves prepared 
by another far mightier and more sublime? 
It is the simple fact. Five times three hun- 
dred years before the Reformation under 
Luther there was an older reformation of 

132 



Paul; an Exemplar of True Manhood 

grander proportions and more wonderful 
triumphs and the hero of it was again a 
single great soul. 

As Paul, the converted persecutor, looked 
forth upon the work to which he felt called 
what did he see? Not a nation, but an 
empire sunk in misery and degradation; 
not a kingdom but the whole Gentile world 
plunged in the darkness and corruption of 
unmitigated paganism. 

No words can describe it. The ignorance, 
the moral blindness, the fantastic supersti- 
tions, the hideous idol-worship, the disgusting 
ceremonies of a heathen ritual, the nameless 
debaucheries, the shameless immoralities, of- 
ten practised under the name of a religious 
service, the bare-faced frauds and impositions 
of the priesthood, the selfishness, the am- 
bition, the supercilious pride, the ruthless 
cruelty, treachery, and oppression of the 
aristocracy, and the awful misery and despair 
of all classes, are past all power to delineate. 
Christian writers unanimously declare that 
the hideous picture surpassed their ability 
to paint. Even the heathen writers of the 
day exhaust the epithets of their vernacular 
in endeavoring to set forth all the hideousness 
of the prospect, and yet confess themselves 
unable to do so. 

Such was the mountain which Paul, by 

133 



The Reason op Suffering 

faith, was set to remove. The whole vast 
Roman empire, with its hoary superstitions, 
its inveterate priestcraft, its subtle philos- 
ophy, its proud aristocracy, its persecuting 
despotism, its fiendish hate, its Bacchanalian 
debauchery, its ghoulish cruelty, avarice and 
degradation, was all heaped up in one scale 
against Christ and his gospel of purity and 
love; and into the other scale, God in His 
providence cast a single apostle and he out- 
weighed them all ! 

Bonaparte conquered a few armies of 
men; Paul overcame the uncounted hosts 
of error. Luther broke the yoke of papal 
superstition for his kindred and nation ; the 
great apostle to the Gentiles, like another 
Atlas, took the pagan world upon his shoul- 
ders and bore it upward into the light. 

It is useless to attempt any detailed de- 
scription of those Herculean labors and un- 
paralleled trials which filled up the days 
and weeks and months of thirty glorious 
years, by which the mighty conquest was 
won. Able writers have essayed the work 
and it has expanded into a series of volumes. 

We follow Alexander's career with breath- 
less interest as we see him plunging into a 
hostile empire, fighting battles, besieging 
cities, crossing deserts, fording rivers, climb- 
ing mountains, and never lowering his banner 

134 



Paul: an Exemplar of True Manhood 

to any foe, till a world was at his feet. Yet 
all this was but child's play compared with 
the task which was imposed upon the great 
apostle, when he heard the voice from heaven 
saying: '* I will send thee far hence unto the 
GentHes." He had to plunge into a hostile 
empire (where " Satan's seat " was) and that 
not with armies at his back — but alone, or 
with but a friend or two. 

He had battles to fight; " I fought with 
beasts at Ephesus," he tells us, speaking 
figuratively after the manner of men; for 
the beasts were those of superstition, hatred 
and religious prejudice. He laid siege to 
cities and never retreated till they surrendered. 
Corinth cost him a year and a half, Ephesus 
three years, but both were his. He climbed 
mountains, crossed deserts, forded streams 
and ploughed his way through stormy seas. 
Four times, in succession he made the circuit 
of a continent, not in steamer and rail-car, 
but on foot or upon the back of the slow- 
paced mule; not stopping in metropolitan 
hotels, but sleeping under the open sky; 
not served by obsequious domestics, with 
the delicacies of the seasons, but satisfying 
hunger with bread and dates and working 
with his own hands for his scanty fare. 

Leagues on leagues (an immense space 
in the total amount) he traversed, smiting 

135 



The Reason of Suffering 

down superstition with the sword of his 
speech, and establishing citadels of the truth, 
in the form of churches, garrisoned by the 
recruits which his irresistible appeals had 
won. 

Behold him in his first campaign, starting 
out from Jerusalem, and reaching Cyprus 
by ship and traversing that great island from 
Salamis to Paphos, converting the proconsul 
and shutting the mouths of the false-prophets ; 
then pressing on into Pisidia, to Antioch, to 
Iconium, to Lystra, where he healed the 
cripple, and stained the streets with his 
blood as the Jews, having stoned him, dragged 
him out for dead; to Derbe, to Lystra 
again, and Iconium and on to Perga and 
Attalia and thence back to Syrian Antioch 
and Jerusalem; performing in two years the 
labors of an ordinary lifetime! See him on 
his second campaign, pushing out over the 
Hellespont into Europe, shaking down with 
his prayers the Philippian jail, preaching 
Jesus and the resurrection from the hill of 
Mars at Athens, evangelizing Thessalonica, 
Berea and Corinth where he met and con- 
founded the keenest sophists of the ancient 
world, and returning to Jerusalem was able 
to report, as the result of his three years' 
labor, that Grecian philosophy had been 
made to bow before the proclamation of 

136 



Paul: an Exemplar of True Manhood 

Jesus Christ and him crucified ! Follow him 
in his third campaign, this time embracing 
in its tremendous circuit both Europe and 
Asia, scouring the great provinces of Galatia, 
Phrygia, Ephesus, Macedonia, Greece, and 
on his return taking in Troas, Miletus, Cyprus, 
Tyre, Ptolemais, Csesarea, and finally Jeru- 
salem, though he knew that bonds were 
awaiting him there. 

Follow him too in his fourth journey, 
with fetters on his limbs, tossed about on the 
stormy Adriatic, saving the crew by his 
prayers and counsels, rewarding the hos- 
pitality of Malta by founding a church, and 
reaching Rome only to carry the gospel 
into the very palace of the Caesars ! 

Add to all these his subsequent journeys 
even to distant Spain, of which there are 
scattered hints in his epistles, and we shall 
begin to get some faint glimpse of the courage, 
the zeal, the faith, the fortitude, the elo- 
quence, the immeasurable energies and ex- 
haustless resources of this most wonderful 
man. Yet how faint a glimpse 1 Who could 
ever set forth all the movement and action of 
that life — the toils, the conflicts, the joys, 
the sorrows, the anxieties and all that in- 
ward travail which was the deep spring of 
all? Who even in imagination can compass 
the reality of those thirty unexampled years? 

137 



The Reason of Suffering 

If any speech could set it forth it should 
be his own, when, reviewing but a part, he 
exclaims, " I labored more abundantly than 
they all : in stripes above measure ; in prisons 
more frequent; in deaths oft. Of the Jews 
five times received I forty stripes save one. 
Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I 
stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night 
and a day have I been in the deep. In 
journeyings often; in perils of waters; in 
perils of robbers; in perils by mine own 
countrymen; in perils by the heathen; in 
perils in the city ; in perils in the wilderness ; 
in perils in the sea; in perils among false 
brethren; in weariness and painfulness; in 
watchings often; in hunger and thirst, in 
fastings often; in cold and nakedness. Be- 
sides those things that are without, that 
which Cometh upon me daily, the care of all 
the churches. Who is weak and I am not 
weak ; who is offended and I burn not ? The 
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ 
which is blessed forever more — knoweth 
that I lie not." 

But it is really useless in any short com- 
pass to seek to raise a just conception of the 
Titanic labors, the martyr sufferings and the 
world-wide triumphs of the conquering apos- 
tle. We can only briefly ask what would be 
wanting if that career had never been run, 
and those triumphs never won? 

138 



Paul: an Exemplar of True Manhood 

Blot out those labors and their results, 
and the world would be wholly changed. 
Humanly speaking, it would be to blot out 
Christendom; for the really vital and in- 
fluential portion of Christendom today has 
grown directly from the seed that he sowed. 

Even the New Testament would be 
sadly, not to say fatally, incomplete without 
the writings of Paul. Where do we look for 
the best view of the exalted place and glorious 
destiny of the flock of Christ — '* the church 
of the first born that are written in heaven" 
— but to the epistle to the Ephesians? It 
was written by Paul. 

Do we seek the best treatise on the order, 
and discipline and work of the church? We 
must study the Corinthian letters; and they 
were written by Paul. 

Do we look for the best exposition and 
defence of the way of life by faith in the 
Son of God? We find them in the letter to 
the church in Galatia, which inspired Luther 
and created Protestantism; and it was writ- 
ten by Paul. 

Do we inquire for the sublimest picture of 
Christ's self-sacrifice, and its influence in 
uplifting and inspiring the believer? We 
must study the Philippian epistle ; and it was 
written by Paul. 

Do we desire the fullest exposition of the 

139 



The Reason of Suffering 

divine Savior dwelling within us as a hidden 
fount of life? We must read Colossians; 
and it was written by Paul. 

Do we seek a clear view of the order of 
events at Christ's approaching Parousia? 
We must turn to the Thessalonian epistles; 
and they were written by Paul. 

Do we demand the best statement of the 
practical duties of officers and members of 
the visible church? The epistles to Timothy 
and Titus will meet the demand; and they 
were written by Paul. 

Finally, do we ask what is the most 
thorough, profound and systematic exposi- 
tion of the plan of salvation to be found in 
the Bible? All theologians of all ages and 
climes lift up their voices with one accord 
and declare that it is found in the Roman 
epistle; and it was the product of the mind 
of Paxil. 

What giant was this that could so tread 
the upper ranges of intellectual and spiritual 
power? And how great a gap would be made 
in the munitions of our faith were all this 
wanting ! 

What if his labors had never had place in 
history? Humanly speaking, modern Chris- 
tianity would have perished at birth. It was 
his hand that scattered the seed, and his 
tears that watered it. His matchless elo- 

140 



Paul: an Exemplar of True Manhood 

quence and consummate wisdom defended the 
growing plants from Jewish hate and Gen- 
tile corruption. No soul less mighty, less 
consecrated, less filled with all the energies 
of a divine love and purpose, could have 
faced a hostile world and triumphantly es- 
tablished a movement out of which has 
directly flowed all that renovation, moral, 
domestic, civil, political and even material 
which has transformed Europe from pagan- 
dom to Christendom. 

Review for a moment the work which he 
did, which without him would never have 
been done; says Monod: '' Go and inquire 
at Ephesus who it was that gave them a 
Christian church; Ephesus will answer with 
one voice, the apostle Paul: Tarsus, the 
apostle Paul; Athens, the apostle Paul; 
Corinth, the apostle Paul. Are you wearied 
with the enumeration? Let us cut it short. 
Salamis, Paphos, Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, 
Lystra, Derbe, Perga, Troas, Philippi, Berea, 
Caesarea, Galatia, Phrygia, Mysia, Pamphylia, 
Cilicia, and how many others — the apostle 
Paul. And with regard to those two great 
capitals, one of the Greek, east, the other of 
the Romans, west — if Antioch and Rome 
can not tell you that their churches were 
founded by the apostle Paul, they will tell 
you that he has so strengthened them by 

141 



The Reason of Suffering 

his word that they regard the foundation of 
those churches as due to him more than to 
the founders themselves — he having so 
often exhorted the one in the Lord and 
having twice visited the other, after he had 
nourished it by that divine letter which 
Saint Chrysostom surnamed * The Golden 
Key of the Scriptures.' We are astonished 
by the amount accomplished by a man — 
a single man. The wonderful activity of 
the apostle imparts to him a kind of omni- 
presence in all the Roman empire, over the 
vast extent of which the name of Paul pro- 
jects everywhere its immense shadow. . . . 
Would not his history seem incredible to us 
were it narrated anywhere except in the sacred 
Scriptures? Would not the chronicler seem 
to be speaking of one of those fabled giants 
to whose adventures fact has hardly con- 
tributed its humble quota or its modest 
starting point? . . . What would have been 
the changes in the history of the world if 
this single man had not been born! You or 
I not in the world, and the effects would 
scarcely have been felt beyond a circle com- 
posed of a few friends, of a limited public, or 
at most of a generation or two. But without 
Saint Paul, who can estimate the immense 
results of the change in the maxims, the 
morals, the literature, the history, the entire 

142 



Paul: an Exemplar of True Manhood 

development of the race beginning with our 
old Europe, which can apply altogether to 
herself that which he wrote to the Christians 
of Thessalonica: * For what is our hope, or 
joy, or crown of rejoicing? Surely ye are 
our glory and joy.' Without Saint Paul, 
take heed, step aside or fear lest you be 
buried beneath the ruins of the entire social 
edifice of eighteen centuries, sinking to its 
foundations! ... To blot out the work of 
Paul would be to blot out all the churches 
that sprang up by hundreds in his footsteps ; 
rear again those temples and those idols 
which he has beaten down; suppress those 
fruitful germs of regeneration for the indi- 
vidual, for the family, for society, which he 
planted from place to place, and plunge 
Europe again in the barbarism of a civiliza- 
tion without God and without hope." 

This picture is not overdrawn. Not too 
often do we think of the mighty debt which 
we Gentiles, to whom he was specially sent, 
owe to the last called apostle, or of the 
transcendent powers of intellect and heart by 
which he wrought such unparalleled deeds. 

Caesar changed Rome's political system: 
but Paul transformed her faith. Romulus 
and Cincinnatus and their compatriots toiled 
eight centuries to create her civilization : Paul 
in the quarter of one century created it anew 

14a 



The Reason of Suffering 

and saved it from impending dissolution. 

Alexander and the great Cyrus scaled 
ramparts and dispersed armies; but the 
mighty apostle did (and is still doing by his 
writings) what is infinitely more difficult. 
He shook cities from their corruption by his 
resistless eloquence, and put to rout the 
banded hosts of spiritual darkness. Next 
to Christ himself, his life and work rank 
highest, and fill the amplest space among 
all the sons of men. 

Wiser than Romulus, broader-minded than 
Caesar, more fixed of purpose and irresistible 
of will than Alexander, with an intellect 
that towered above that of a Cyrus, and 
with a spiritual insight, might and sensi- 
bility that surpassed them all, he stands, 
next to the Son of God himself, the most 
majestic figure that has yet trodden our 
planet. And he did not shrink from Suf- 
fering ! 



144 



IX 

THE KINGLINESS OF TRUTH 

Christ standing before Pilate explains 
the source and nature of his kingdom. He 
is a king, he affirms, but not in a worldly 
sense so as to be in any way Pilate's rival or 
competitor. 

In proof of this he appeals to the peace- 
ful, non-resistant attitude of his followers. 

" My kingdom," he says, '* is not of this 
world: if my kingdom were of this world 
then would my servants fight that I should 
not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my 
kingdom not from hence." 

This argument Pilate imperfectly compre- 
hends. He has no conception of any kingdom 
not built on force and worldly policy. 

A kingdom '* not of this world," seems to 
him no kingdom at all, and his surprise finds 
vent in the question, " Art thou a king 
then? " In what possible sense can you who 
renounce all kingly state and power call your- 
self a king? 

Now is the momeat for Christ to set the 
facts before him : 

He is a king by the simple power of the 

145 



The Reason of Suffering 

truth he reveals, and by this power he is to 
attract to himself the subjects of an unending 
dominion, and he replies: 

* * Thou sayest it ; (You have it ; you have 
used the right word) for I am a king. To 
this end was I born and for this cause came 
I into the world that I should bear witness 
unto the truth. Every one that is of the 
truth heareth (obeyeth) my voice." 

Pilate's half -sneering ejaculation, *' What 
is truth? " as he turns to go out, shows how 
utterly unable he is to penetrate the meaning 
of the Savior's pregnant words, or to see in 
the truth any title to kingship. 

Yet the truth most plainly does bear the 
insignia of royalty. 

It is kingly in Authority. 

It has in itself something which constrains 
us to yield it the throne. We feel instinctively, 
before argument and without argument, that 
we ought to accord to truth our assent and 
adherence simply because it is truth. It has 
an inherent splendor; a glory of its own, 
which gives it a sort of lordship over us. 

There is in it an inborn majesty, a native 
kingliness that entitles it to our fealty. We 
see intuitively, and cannot help seeing, that 
it behooves us as rational beings to pay it 
the tribute of our assent and obedience. 

There is a divine propriety, an eternal 

146 



The Kingliness of Truth 

fitness, in owning and adhering to it which 
constitutes an indefeasible obligation. 

And it is worthy of this unquestioning 
allegiance for its own sake alone, whether 
otherwise it brings us loss or gain. 

It matters not that we can see no ex- 
trinsic advantage, no selfish benefit, accruing 
from our loyalty; that loyalty is none the 
less our duty. 

It matters not that such loyalty will bring 
upon us outward loss and personal incon- 
venience, we are still bound to maintain it. 

No circumstances can exist, or even be 
imagined, by which its rightful claim to our 
allegiance would be abrogated or even di- 
minished. We can never, in any case, desert 
it without an instant sense of degradation. 
Whatever sacrifice be shunned, or profit be 
gained, we feel abased, degraded, reduced in 
the scale of being by our recreancy. 

And we feel so because we are so. The 
fact that we are so is a fact which we clearly 
see in the light of its own necessity. We are 
conscious of an inward stain of treason which 
no splendor of worldly fame can erase or 
cover. Hence we never envy a man any 
degree of wealth, power or notoriety when 
acquired at such a price. Our contempt for 
him more than outweighs our estimate of 
his possessions, and we deem that man richer 

147 



The Reason of Suffering 

who has clung to the truth, though at the 
sacrifice of everything else. 

Cranmer's recantation is hardly purged 
by the fires of his martyrdom. Peter's denial 
of a simple fact has filled the Christian ages 
with warning. And we still read with feelings 
of mingled shame and sorrow of Galileo re- 
nouncing even a scientific truth to escape 
imprisonment. Notwithstanding the palliat- 
ing circumstances, his own age and infir- 
mities, and the threats and cruelty of his 
bigoted persecutors, that act still remains 
an indelible stigma upon his fame. We may 
and do compassionate but can never excuse 
him. 

On the other hand when we see a man 
braving death for the truth, like Poly carp at 
the stake, like Huss before his judges, or 
like Luther in the German diet unmoved by 
the angry gaze of kings, exclaiming, " Here 
I stand, I can do no otherwise, God help 
me," no words are too emphatic to express 
our sympathy and admiration. So natural 
and irresistible is our conviction that truth 
is clothed with Authority, and has an in- 
alienable right to command our allegiance. 

It is kingly, too, in Power. 

Power of control as well as right of com- 
mand belongs to true sovereignty, and such 
power the truth has. It rules as a victor. It 

148 



The Kingliness of Truth 

conquers for itself a kingdom, and has sub- 
jects because it gathers them by the might 
of its own puissant arm. It bears sway in the 
spiritual sphere. It has power to grasp the 
reason, move the conscience and stir the 
heart, which cannot be altogether resisted. 
It brings the noblest spirits of every age in 
willing subjection to its feet. 

The track of centuries past is dotted thick 
with its shining trophies. 

What called the great Augustine from 
the haunts of dissipation to a foremost place 
in the church of God? The power of truth. 
"Take, read," was the voice he seemed to 
hear, as his eye one day fell on a Testament. 
He opened the book at random and read : 

" Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in 
chambering and wantonness, not in strife and 
envying, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ 
and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil 
the lusts thereof." His whole soul shook and 
bowed down before the calm majesty of 
those searching words. They met his case. 
They rebuked his dark debaucheries, and 
opened to view the pathway of light, and he 
was conquered by the power of truth. 

What reclaimed from his atheism the 
cultured Junius? A glance of his eye upon a 
Testament opened at the beginning of the 
gospel of John: " In the beginning was the 

149 



The Reason of Suffering 

Word ; and the Word was with God, and the 
Word was God. The same was in the begin- 
ning with God. All things were made by 
Him; and without Him was not anything 
made that was made. In Him was life ; and 
the life was the light of men; and the light 
shineth in darkness and the darkness com- 
prehended it not." His reason responded 
to the infallible word. The sublime verities 
of eternity rushed upon his soul, and he sur- 
rendered to the truth. 

What was the power that subdued that 
stubborn infidel at the sound of his own 
voice, who scoffingly repeated the Publi- 
can's prayer, '* God be merciful to me a 
sinner"? The truth of his own sinfulness 
and urgent need of God's infinite mercy, 
bursting as never before upon his view, woke 
his slumbering conscience and won the con- 
quest. 

Once the writer met a man in a social 
circle. After his retirement a brother present 
told us the story of his conversion. He had 
been a careless, impenitent scoffer loving to 
turn religion into ridicule. One day to amuse 
his comrades he mounted a chair and under- 
took to preach a mock sermon; but ere he 
had finished, the truth he was speaking in 
jest laid hold of him in earnest and he became 
another trophy of its power. 

150 



The Kingliness of Truth 

But why multiply examples when every 
conversion to God, every soul renewed, every 
life reformed, purified, ennobled, is an ex- 
ample; so the Scriptures teach: '* Of His 
own will begat He us by the word of truth." 
'* Born again, not of corruptible seed but of 
incorruptible, by the word of God which 
liveth and abideth forever." " Sanctify them 
through thy truth, thy word is truth." The 
trophies of the truth are as numerous as the 
saints in light plus the company of the saints 
still journeying through the gloom of earth. 

Do we honor that word enough? Do we 
estimate highly enough its power over the 
hearts of men, especially of the young, and 
use it accordingly? 

Monod, the eminent French divine, re- 
lates the following incident. A certain lady 
of his acquaintance was married to an infidel 
who made a jest of religion in the presence 
of his own children; yet she succeeded in 
bringing them all up in the fear of the Lord. 
Monod one day asked her how it was that 
she preserved them from the influence of a 
father whose sentiments were so hostile to 
her own. This was her answer: '' Because 
to the authority of a father I did not oppose 
the authority of a mother but that of God. 
From their earliest years my children have 
always seen the Bible upon my table. This 

151 



The Reason of Suffering 

holy book has constituted the whole of their 
religious instruction. I was silent that I 
might allow it to speak. Did they propose a 
question, did they commit any fault, did 
they perform any good action, I opened the 
Bible, and the Bible answered, reproved and 
encouraged them. The constant reading of 
the Scriptures has alone wrought the prodigy 
which surprises you." 

This was a great victory, and we have 
only to glance at history to see the same 
principle illustrated on an extended scale. 

What was it that brought a whole nation 
trembling to their knees in the days of king 
Josiah? The simple power of the truth, for- 
gotten for a time, but now rediscovered and 
newly enforced. 

What was it that rocked the same nation 
at a later period as with the throes of an 
earthquake, bringing the multitudes and even 
the scribes and other dignitaries of the 
Theocracy down to the Jordan to be baptized 
by a plain man of the wilderness? It was 
simply the power of the truth, proclaimed 
with living zeal. 

What was it in the sixteenth century that 
upheaved the stagnant masses of society, 
dashed in pieces the chains of a corrupt 
formalism, shook the papal throne, and in- 
augurated a new era? The power of truth 

152 



The Kingliness of Truth 

proclaimed by the tongue of a single man I 

So has it ever been. Truth is kingly in 
the march of progress. It moves victorious 
through the centuries, as a mailed conqueror, 
overturning thrones, trampling crowns, and 
rolling mightily onward the great world 
changes. In the calm beauty and majesty of 
unclouded truth as it shines from God's 
word there is a fascination which draws 
upward the nations. 

You have seen the sun as it bursts over 
the hills and pours its strong beams upon 
the mists sleeping in the valley. Instantly 
there is a commotion. Those unformed cloud 
vapors feel the touch as sleeping armies hear 
the sound of their leader's bugle. They take 
shapely forms ; they part into definite groups ; 
they plume their wings ; they rise from their 
earthy bed, in mid-air or along the slope of 
the hills, and soon are sailing the upper 
sky radiant in the livery of the sun their 
king ! 

Such is the power of truth. It touches 
with its beams the earth-bound soul and it 
plumes its wings for an upward flight, and 
puts on the livery of a better kingdom. 

Christ could say in the consciousness of 
an indefeasible birthright, *' I am a king," 
because he could also say '' I am the truth." 
" To this end was I born, and for this cause 

153 



The Reason of Suffering 

came I into the world that I should bear 
witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of 
the truth heareth (obeyeth) my voice." 

Finally, the truth is kingly in Judgment. 

Judging is a kingly prerogative and the 
truth has it. 

Instrumentally the truth judges us. Ac- 
cording to our real, inward choice and charac- 
ter it holds commission to lift us up or cast 
us down. It thus separates and distinguishes, 
that is, judges, instrumentally, between oppo- 
site characters, and hurries them on to their 
destiny of glory or of shame. 

Sow with wheat in autumn two patches of 
ground, one of good soil and one of sand, and 
amid the snows and gloom of winter they 
cannot be distinguished. But when the 
vernal sun pours down his beams and dis- 
sipates the frosts, the hidden difference will 
speedily appear. 

Falling on the good soil those beams are 
the message of life, touching with resurrection 
power all the hidden germs and soon clothing 
the field in the grace and beauty of living 
verdure. 

But to the barren soil they are the mes- 
sage of death. Its flinty particles feel them 
as the touch of fire. They glow with baleful 
heat. The very germs of life are withered and 
consumed and nothing remains but hideous 



The Kingliness of Truth 

barrenness. And so the truth shining upon 
the conscience and heart either quickens or 
destroys. According to the real quaHty of 
the inmost choice of the soul, it wakes and 
quickens to Hfe and power all the germs of 
good implanted by God in our nature, crown- 
ing a man with the bloom of every noble 
quality; or it sears the conscience, hardens 
the heart and burns out from the soul every 
possibility of good. 

He who rejects the truth the truth rejects. 
He who obeys it the truth ennobles. 

Hence the coming of the truth is not a 
blessing to all; the reverse is true of those 
who vilify it ; it hardens and drives them 
farther into darkness. It brings out and in- 
tensifies the difference between the good and 
the evil, making the former better and the 
latter, if obdurate, still worse. 

The proclamation of the truth to the 
nations not alone saves; some it destroys. 
Righteousness is indeed built up, but wicked- 
ness also is changed to darker hues. The 
intellectual and moral elevation, so evident 
and precious on the one hand, is offset by an 
opposite work of degradation on the other. 
The virtues of civilized and enlightened com- 
munities are indeed admirable ; but there 
are no vices like those that dog their foot- 
steps. No outgrowths of heathenism are 

155 



The Reason of Suffering 

quite so repulsive, all things considered, as 
the nameless pollutions that fester in the 
slums of our great cities. And it becomes 
to each of us a serious question to ask what 
is our relation to the truth, when we con- 
sider Paul's weighty assertion; " For we 
(who proclaim the truth) are unto God a 
sweet savour of Christ, both in them that are 
saved and in them that perish. To the one 
we are the savour of death unto death; 
and to the other the savour of life unto life. 
And who is sufficient for these things? " 

*' Take the talent from him and give it 
unto him that hath ten talents. For unto 
everyone that hath shall be given, and he 
shall have abundance; but from him that 
hath not shall be taken away even that which 
he seemeth to have " is the ever repeated 
mandate of the truth, as it discerns between 
its friend and its foes; and the final irrev- 
ocable sentence will be couched in similar 
terms. 

Turn your gaze on yonder ships becalmed 
at sea. Their sails are up waiting for the 
wind and a careless eye might easily fail to 
note any difference in their position and im- 
agine those vessels but a single fleet bound 
for the same harbor. But anon the breeze 
freshens ; a strong wind strikes athwart the 
swelling canvas, and instantly those ships 

156 



The Kingliness op Truth 

separate. The set of the sails differs; they 
receive the wind on opposite sides; and the 
same power wafts some to the quiet haven 
and drives others to hopeless wreck on distant 
seas. 

xVnd so when the power of truth shall fall 
on souls laid bare to it by the revelations of 
the world to come, it will divide between 
them according to the real set of the choice 
and character and doom them to bliss or 
woe. 

" He that rejecteth me," says Christ, in 
the calm consciousness of his eternal king- 
ship, "and receiveth not my words, hath one 
that judgeth him; the word that I have 
spoken, the same shall judge him in the last 
day." 



157 



X 

PIETY AND PROSPERITY 

It would seem at first like a rash asser- 
tion to say that piety is the efficient cause of 
all forms of prosperity; that all the progress 
in knowledge, in wealth, in refinement, and 
in the arts of life, which bridges the gulf 
between the Bushman and the civilized man, 
is directly due to the uplifting power of the 
religious sentiment. Hardly such is the gen- 
eral impression. Most men view outward 
prosperity as the result of quite other causes. 
Man's physical needs; his social and intel- 
lectual cravings; these are the readiest ex- 
planation of his upward struggle. There is a 
theory widely accepted which actually puts 
temporal welfare as logically first, and re- 
ligion second. It tells us that culture is the 
efficient cause of all well-being; that all 
progress begins in the region of secular wants 
and interests; and that religion is to be 
reached, if at all, at the end of the process 
as the natural and final result. But the real 
facts look the other way. Little as we might 
think it upon a surface view, it is yet rigidly 
true that all real, permanent progress in 

158 



Piety and Prosperity 

every sphere of life depends upon religion. 

Art and science are often adduced by the 
culture theorists as the two chief factors or 
instruments of progress. Let it be granted; 
but whence came they? Architecture is a 
branch of art as important perhaps as any 
in its contribution to the outward life. 
Surely this, if any, might well be supposed to 
have had its origin in secular needs, in the 
necessity of shelter for the body, and in the 
natural desire for comfort and elegance in 
the home. The culture theory asserts this. 
It requires us to suppose that men first began 
to beautify and adorn their own dwellings 
and model them according to the rules of art, 
and that having thus attained to taste and 
skill they proceeded as a last step to apply 
the same to the symbols and houses of wor- 
ship. 

But what was the fact? Exactly the 
opposite; the order was reversed. History 
tells us that the first specimens of archi- 
tectural skill were strictly religious. They 
were columns, shafts, temples, erected in 
honor of the Deity. Even while their own 
houses were of the rudest order and wholly 
devoid of art, men began to erect houses of 
worship whose beauty is a wonder today. 
Not till a later period did they bethink them- 
selves to apply the same principles to the 

159 



The Reason of Suffering 

private dwelling. It was up here in the 
sphere of the highest, the religious sentiments, 
that the movement began. Here was the 
inspiration that gave it birth and the power 
that carried it forward. The application of 
the art was from this point downward through 
the various secular uses and not from the 
lowest point upward. 

It could not be otherwise. Man's secular 
needs had not power to uplift and carry him 
forward. They lacked inspiration. They 
could not awaken and set in activity those 
higher ranges of faculty which alone are com- 
petent to such high work. Left to themselves 
they are wholly unable to overcome the in- 
ertia, the sluggishness, the downward tendency 
of uncultured nature, and man sinks instead 
of rises. With no other spur than bodily 
need at the outset he would have been con- 
tent to dwell forever in a cave, a wigwam, or 
a hovel, as incompetent to apply the laws of 
taste as he was indifferent to their violation. 
And all for the simple reason that he had no 
taste, and no influence at work upon him 
sufficient to quicken the faculty in him. 

But the moment the religious sentiments 
came into play a deeper need was felt, a more 
powerful spur was applied, and the higher 
faculties waked up. Here in the themes of 
religion was something lofty, sacred, sub- 

160 



Piety and Prosperity 

lime. Here was a new stimulus to action 
infinitely keener than any gross need of the 
body. The thought of God and His high 
attributes lifted the soul. New conceptions 
flooded the mind. He formed the idea of a 
Being exalted above the world and spiritually 
glorious; and he felt irresistibly impelled 
to make the fane of his worship in some 
measure correspond with such an idea. His 
reverence, his sense of greatness, holiness, 
power, struggled to find expression; and 
when he built the house of God he felt a need 
to make it imposing and beautiful, which he 
had never felt and never would have felt, 
while building his own. But now he felt it 
even when building his own. The idea of 
beauty and symmetry once awakened, slum- 
bered no more. The light that had broken 
upon him out of heaven penetrated down- 
ward through all the lower ranges of his 
experience and the hut was soon exchanged 
for the cottage, the wigwam for the villa. 

And here let us note another decisive 
fact; and that is that the acknowledged 
masterpieces of the art have appeared in the 
closest relation with the religious sentiment. 
No dwelling of an earthly monarch, in the 
days of Solomon, equalled the temple. None 
today presumes to compare with the mighty 
fane of St. Peter's at Rome. What means this 

161 



The Reason of Suffering 

fact? Nothing less than does the preceding, 
and that is that the religious sentiment does 
indeed furnish the real, interior, genuine 
art-impulse. 

Of twenty men who attempt to scale the 
Alps, he who reaches the highest point must 
have been strongest at the start. What is 
the chief power that saves from stagnation the 
billowy mass of yonder sea? The one doubt- 
less that rolls the waters highest upon the 
sands; and that is not the noisv force of 
earth-bom winds, but the silent, uplifting 
energy of a mighty orb that looks down out 
of heaven. And ever the impulse that lifts 
man to the highest achievement is of neces- 
sity the one that has wrought most power- 
fully at every antecedent step of his progress. 

The culture theory breaks down at the 
first test. Man did not first beautify and 
adorn his own house, and then by conse- 
quence the house of God. The order was 
reversed. He first built and adorned the 
house of God, and then by consequence his 
own dwelling. The religious sentiment was 
the source of the whole movement. Piety 
was first, prosperity second; religion went 
before culture, the shrine before the cottage, 
the temple before the palace. That art 
which was to exert a quite incalculable in- 
fluence in the elevation of man's secular 

162 



Piety and Prosperity 

state, started into life at the beck of religion 
and lighted her torch at the altars of God. 

Precisely thus stands the case with every 
other branch of art. Painting and sculpture 
are noble forms of art. Whence had they 
birth? Not at all from any secular impulse. 
None such was strong enough. They grew 
directly from the religious sentiment. The 
proof is the same as in the iirst instance; 
and that is that the first and fairest monu- 
ments of these arts have been symbols and 
images connected with worship. It was only 
at a later period that humbler themes invoked 
their powers. The light shone from above 
downward and not the reverse. The master- 
pieces of the Greek sculptors were the statues 
of their divinities. They have never been 
surpassed. Where are the works of the 
chief limners ? In the cathedrals and churches 
of Europe. What were their themes? The 
holy family, the miracles, the last supper, 
the crucifixion, the judgment scene, all ex- 
clusively religious. 

High art did not begin, as indeed it 
could not, in an impulse to body forth in 
marble, or on the canvas any merely human 
sentiment, or excellence, but something di- 
vine. Only the latter had power deeply to 
stir the soul and brace it for such a task. 

Right here is the place to bring into view 

163 



The Reason op Suffering 

another side of the subject. Two words will 
suggest it ; skill, invention — significant words ! 
and how much of the world's wealth is 
in them traced to its source! The infinite 
appliances, now so familiar, for comfort, for 
convenience, for adornment, and above all, 
for the saving of labor — sweep away these, 
and the vast edifice of our industrial and 
commercial system would dissolve like a snow 
palace under the sun of the tropics. How has 
this edifice been built up? Whence came the 
skill and the ingenuity needful for such a 
task? The savage has them not. What first 
stimulated the intellect, purged the eye, 
trained the hand of civilized man and em- 
powered him to this vast creation? 

It would be doubly natural here to fall in 
with the culture theory, and to suppose that 
the training began at the lowest point, under 
the spur of bodily needs; and that it ad- 
vanced step by step as new needs were felt, 
till at last such great ingenuity and skill were 
acquired, in meeting secular wants, that men 
became competent for the highest applica- 
tion of these qualities in the production of 
the masterpieces of high art — natural, in 
short, to suppose that the lower forms, the 
economic arts, would appear first, and the 
fine arts last. 

What, however, is the fact? Again, ex- 

164 



Piety and Prosperity 

actly the opposite. The fine arts appeared 
first, the economic arts as a body later. The 
movement began in the highest sphere and 
the lower received the benefit. Here in the 
upper regions was the school of all art. Here 
was the prime source of quickening, stimu- 
lation, inspiration. Here it was that the 
intellect was roused, the eye purged, the 
hand trained. The whole man was raised to 
a higher level, and endowed with new powers 
which he then could use, and did use to 
better his earthly condition, as he could not 
do before. 

The masterpieces of Greek art antedate 
by a double millennium the beginning of 
modern inventive art. Yet the skill that 
produced them was infinitely greater than 
that necessary to construct a cotton-gin or a 
carpet sweeper. Why was this? Why was 
it that fine art culminated so long ago, while 
lower arts go on in an even tenor of progress? 
Why was the most difficult achievement so 
much earlier than the less difficult? Simply 
because the former is a fountain and the latter 
only streams. It is the way of fountains to 
be before their streams and on a higher level. 
The place for your fountain is upon the hill- 
side. Once opened it holds its place; but 
the streams are forever flowing farther onward 
through the valley. High art once achieved 

165 



The Reason of Suffering 

under the power of the religious sentiment 
remains forever a fountain of quickening 
influence whose streams make glad the val- 
leys of secular life. 

But the culture theory would have us 
believe that the fountain is in the valley and 
that the streams run backward uphill into 
the mountain. No: high art is not rooted 
in lower, but the lower in the higher. And 
the higher draws its life directly from re- 
ligion. And thus to her power and mighty 
working is due all that vast sum of temporal 
well-being comprised under the name of 
modem material progress. 

There are three other forms of high art; 
music, poetry and general literature. Their 
vast service as elements of progress is ac- 
knowledged by all. Whence then, we ask 
once more, had they birth and what was the 
course of their development? 

The answer cannot be other than that 
already given in the previous cases. Indeed, 
even the most enthusiastic devotee of the 
culture theory must, methinks, pause here 
and hesitate to say that these arts could have 
taken their start at the lowest point, that of 
physical need. Savage man, absorbed in 
hunting and fishing, and satisfied with a mud 
hovel and a coat of skins, would hardly have 
found in these conditions the necessary stimu- 

166 



Piety and Prosperity 

lation. Songs and odes and learned essays 
would scarcely have occurred to them, at 
this stage, as the most desirable additions to 
their worldly gear. We are quite ready to 
be told, as the fact is, that these arts owed 
their early origin among rude men, to the 
highest of all sentiments of which we are 
capable, those namely, that are inspired by 
the idea of a Supreme Being. 

Music, DeQuincey tells us, has power 
beyond anything else to wake in the soul the 
feeling of the infinite. Which is but another 
way of saying that it has power beyond all 
else to express this feeling. In the impulse 
to do this, in the need felt to tell forth in 
some new and powerful way the soul's deep 
sense of the things of God, had music its 
origin. 

Short work can be made of the proof. 
For the first use, and always the chief use, 
and for ages almost the sole use of music 
has been as an aid in worship. As a system 
it grew up bodily inside of the churches. 
The very scale of eight sounds, which is its 
ground-work, is due to the monk Guido of 
the eleventh century; and it came suddenly 
to him, as by a special illumination from 
heaven, as he was one day chanting in the 
monastery choir. 

In this country we are told that from the 

167 



The Reason of Suffering 

landing of the Pilgrims till 1825, two centuries 
and more, all studies were confined to sacred 
music. The greatest of the old composers 
wrought professedly for the glory of God. 
And it is acknowledged that the highest 
perfection was reached in the sacred ora- 
torios and like pieces of Handel, Haydn, 
Beethoven, and Mozart. 

The attempt to put the world first and 
God last is a signal failure here. Man sang 
the praise of God before he sang the praises 
of anything else, otherwise he had been tune- 
less forever. He did not begin to sing of 
love, of wine and of heroes through all the 
infinite pathos and bathos of the merely 
human sentiments, and last of all sing of 
things divine. The order was reversed. God 
was first, humanity second. The psalm was 
before the ode, the choir before the orchestra, 
the anthem ages before the glee. Religion 
first tuned the lyre and loosed the angel of 
song, who then sped forth on her beautiful 
mission to add a nameless elevation and 
refinement to all the common sentiments of 
our nature. 

In saying this much about music we have 
of necessity almost literally given also the 
history of poetry, so closely are the two 
allied. The muses are all sisters, but Euterpe 
and Polyhymnia are veritable twins. Poetry 

168 



Piety and Prosperity 

is but the music of articulate speech as music 
is but the poetry of inarticulate sound. Even 
its essence is defined to be a marked and 
peculiar elevation of style above ordinary 
discourse. 

How then could ordinary matters, the 
most ordinary, the lowest and grossest of 
human interests, have furnished any im- 
pulse or occasion for such an elevation? It 
was impossible. Nothing could be more so. 
Such a cause and such an effect could as 
little go together as leaden weights and a 
quickened pace, or blocks of ice and the 
kindling of a fire. It was not until the great 
thoughts of God and the world to come 
wrought in the mind that it was lifted, stimu- 
lated and empowered to the supreme efforts 
of the poetic faculty. The ancient Greeks 
understood this. They deemed their poets 
inspired, and they held it as a creed that a 
special divinity presided over each separate 
branch of the art. Suetonius long ago told 
out the whole truth in a word when he 
testified that ** religion is the mother of 
poetry." 

And if of poetry, then surely of all forms 
of literature, for poetry leads the whole 
choir. Indeed, the evidence is before our 
eyes and in our hands. What is the oldest 
of all books? By many ages, the Bible. And 

169 



The Reason of Suffering 

generally the first books of a nation are its 
sacred books ; tribes so degraded as to have 
no sacred books have simply had none at all. 

The book of Job is the earliest known 
poem and perhaps the best. Genesis is the 
first History. Exodus and Leviticus the 
first law-treatise. The sublimest specimens 
of style are in David's psalms and the proph- 
ecies of Isaiah. And what are the master- 
pieces of these later ages? Two names stand 
easily first on the roll of fame, and the titles 
of their works point us to the source of their 
inspiration; they are Dante, Milton: "The 
Divina Comedia " and '' Paradise Lost." So 
true is it that all real progress accomplished 
by art has had within it, as its vital principle 
and sustaining power, a religious impulse. 

But it is time to take a look at science, 
the second main factor of progress. The 
word means not simply knowledge but clear, 
definite, systematized knowledge, the fruit 
of study and painstaking research. It has 
had a vast growth in the last hundred years, 
and has contributed an indispensable quota 
to the upbuilding of our material prosperity. 
That prosperity is an edifice sustained by 
two pillars; and, like the temple destroyed 
by Samson, it falls if either is rent away. 
Art was necessary; science was equally in- 
diopensable. What is its history? 

i7t) 



Piety and Prosperity 

If the culture theory were correct, practical 
science ought to have been first, and theology 
last. Men ought to have begun with earth 
and ended with heaven. But lo: the fact is 
an exact inversion of this order. Theology 
was first, and geology the last of all. Men 
began with heaven and ended with earth. 

There was reason enough surely in man's 
secular needs and in the natural thirst for 
knowledge, why he should have applied him- 
self to scientific study; but neither spur 
proved sharp enough. Such was his slug- 
gishness that neither stimulus nor both com- 
bined had power to rouse and hold him to 
earnest thought and patient investigation. 
His efforts were wretched spasms, and he was 
continually slipping back into the haze of a 
lazy animalism. 

Only thus do we understand the fact that 
so many tribes have continued for ages in 
the depths of savage ignorance. Certainly 
their need was great enough. If misery and 
outward wretchedness were the prime motive 
to science, surely they ought to have been 
the most enthusiastic of students. And as 
to pure love of knowledge, they had the same 
earth and skies above and around them, and 
equal outward appeals to natural curiosity 
with the rest of mankind. 

Yet both motives failed; and failed too 

171 



The Reason of Suffering 

most signally, just where the conditions were 
such as to make them naturally strongest. 
What demonstration of their insufficiency 
could be more complete? If fire melt not 
the metal when it is hottest, it will never do 
it. If the wind stir not the grounded ship 
when at its greatest force, she will remain 
stuck fast on the sand bar. The continued 
and hopeless ignorance of so many savage 
tribes at this very hour is a visible and crush- 
ing refutation of the culture theory. Why 
did they not begin to rise long ago if it were 
in man to do so under the impulse of secular 
needs ? 

The theory that man has wrapt up in his 
mere animal and intellectual nature the effi- 
cient principle of progress is falsified by 
history. One instance of decline, of a down- 
ward plunge into darkness and degradation, 
is sufficient to disprove it; but there have 
been many such. And where progress has 
again set in after decline it has always been 
through an impulse communicated from with- 
out, from some other people. The great 
men of a nation who have led it to a higher 
position have ever appeared to be moved by 
an impulse from on high; they have visibly 
not been, as the culture men phrase it, the 
product of their age. They were above their 
age rather than of it. The age has generally 

172 



Piety and Prosperity 

misunderstood them. The age has hated 
and opposed them, and not seldom slain 
them. The age gave Socrates the hemlock, 
sawed Isaiah into four parts, and burned 
Huss at the stake. The Son of God himself 
suffered only what the age adjudged to him. 
Far indeed was he from being the product of 
his age. He came down out of heaven, 
God's great gift to it and to all the ages; 
but in a divine, supernatural way which 
ought to teach the world, once for all, that 
culture from below is not the chief method 
of progress appointed by God. No, great 
men (and none are truly so but the good) are 
not the product of the age ; they are gifts of 
God to the age, and bring quickening to it, 
even when martyred by it. 

The fact is there has been but one stream 
of permanent progress running through his- 
tory, and that is the stream whose fountain 
was opened when the cloud of the divine 
presence covered the quaking mount; and 
its course has been directly through the 
stages of Jewish training and Christian evan- 
gelism. Apart from this stream, and the 
rills covertly derived from it, there has been 
little but stagnation and retrogression. The 
whole upward movement has had a religious 
center, and has drawn its inspiration directly 
from the throne of God. 

173 



The Reason of Suffering 

No : the first themes that actually roused 
men to deep, earnest, effectual thought and 
study were not the interests of the secular 
life, but the infinitely higher themes of God, 
of immortality and of the world to come. 
These struck a chord deep enough to resound 
through the whole nature, rouse the higher 
ranges of faculty, overcome animalism, and 
set the mind on a never ending career of 
achievement. 

Theology was the first science. Even 
pagan philosophy was a rude and darkened 
theology. God was studied first and the 
world afterwards. The first schools were 
the schools of the prophets. The college was 
long before the common school, and the 
original college was simply a theological 
seminary. 

The church is the acknowledged mother 
of the European educational system. The 
movement can be traced back as far as the 
third century. It struggled sturdily through 
the Dark Ages, and at the Reformation broke 
forth with tenfold power. During that long 
middle period the chief seats of learning were 
in the monasteries, where at least the monks 
and the clergy could be instructed in the 
rudiments of knowledge ; while the mass were 
too ignorant either to write or read their own 
names. 

174 



Piety and Prosperity 

The University of Paris, supposed to be 
the oldest, was called the *' first school of the 
church." The great universities of Kongs- 
berg, Jena, Halle, Gottingen and Berlin, grew 
directly out of the quickened religious feeling 
of the Reformation. It was none other than 
Luther, the great reformer himself, and his 
follower Melancthon, who planned and in- 
augurated the German school system, perhaps 
the best in the world. 

In this country the first school established, 
and that but six years from the settlement of 
Boston, was not a school of technology, or 
of surveying, or a commercial institution, 
but Harvard College; whose object was de- 
clared, in its charter, to be **the glory of 
God and the good of all his elect people the 
world throughout, in vindicating the truth of 
Christ, and promoting his glorious kingdom." 
Yale soon followed; and the motive was 
stated to be, ** a sincere regard to and zeal 
for upholding and propagating the Christian 
Protestant Religion. ' ' 

In 1647 the first order for establishing 
common schools was issued in the colony of 
Connecticut and the order itself declared the 
purpose to be to *' defeat Satan's project of 
keeping men, by ignorance, from the knowl- 
edge of the Scriptures." Verily, he who will 
deny that education and science are the 

175 



The Reason of Suffering 

offspring of religion must quit reading his- 
tory. He must shut both eyes, stop both 
ears, and cease even to observe the workings 
of his own mind. The whole movement began 
with a religious impulse. The highest point 
hitherto has been reached under the propul- 
sion of the same power. And nowhere has 
any other principle shown itself able to battle 
successfully with opposing forces. 

Thus we come to a clear understanding 
of the nature of art and science. Art, in its 
origin, is simply the effort of the religious 
sentiment to express itself. While science, 
in its origin, is the effort of that sentiment to 
understand itself. All the secular applica- 
tions of art may really be said to carry out 
and complete the expression; since all true 
outward beauty, culture and refinement is 
but a shadow, an analagon, an appointed 
representation and manifestation of inward 
spiritual good. 

All the secular sciences, being views of 
God through his works, are but branches of 
the one great all-inclusive science, theology — 
the science or knowledge of God — and do 
thus appear but as auxiliaries to the full 
understanding of man's spiritual relations. 
The whole body of the arts and sciences are 
legitimately but the garment and instruments 
of the religious sentiment, and all the bound- 

176 



Piety and Prosperity 

less blessings they have brought to man's 
outward life (which is all we can boast of 
above mere savagery) are due directly to the 
mighty working of the religious impulse. 

Sow in yonder fertile field all kinds of 
good seed, but shut off the sunlight and there 
is no growth; cold, dormant and dead lie 
those germs of life, and decay in the soil. No 
light of man's lighting, no fire of his kindling 
can shed upon them one ray of quickening 
power. But bring back the sun and let his 
strong beams shine down out of heaven, and 
instantly life, action, growth begin. Looking 
earthward like the culture theorist, we seem 
to see the beautiful organisms of all varied 
forms and proportions, rising as if pushed 
up by forces from below. But looking heaven- 
ward we learn our mistake, and perceive 
that the real power that bids them rise is a 
stream of quickening influence pouring down 
from above. 

God is our sun ; and all the needs, capaci- 
ties and energies of our rational nature are 
but germs utterly powerless and dead until 
quickened from above by the subtle influence 
of which religion is the source. There is 
progress, growth, in all secular matters from 
the lower stages to the higher ; but the power 
that produces it is an invisible influence 
pouring down from a fount high up on the 

177 



The Reason of Suffering 

hill of God. Open this, and all else thrives. 
Clog this, and all else withers. Piety is first, 
prosperity is second. Seek first righteous- 
ness and the kingdom of God, and all lower 
good, by force of law, is added thereto. 

Even where a people has become pos- 
sessed of a good degree of secular prosperity 
they cannot keep it without the help of 
religion. A fact that has been only too clearly 
illustrated by several of the nations of Chris- 
tendom. 

Spain once stood at the top round of the 
ladder of European wealth and power. A 
degenerate religion has dragged her to the 
bottom. France, as is well known, had a 
similar experience. When Louis XIV drove 
out the Protestant Huguenots — a million of 
his best subjects — he tore out the corner- 
stone of the French monarchy which toppled 
from that hour and fell headlong at last in 
the vortex of the revolution. Italy has had 
a like experience. So have Egypt and North 
Africa. And so in different circumstances 
have the cities of Greece and Asia Minor. 

The traveller in Europe knows when he 
crosses the line from a Catholic to a Protestant 
country by the instant betterment of the 
social condition. The people are on a visibly 
higher level. They live in better houses, 
wear better clothes, eat better food, earn 

178 



Piety and Prosperity 

greater wages, are more intelligent, refined, 
capable, and in all ways better provided with 
the means of comfort and enjoyment; the 
fruit, all, of a purer religion. 

Germany presents today a most instruc- 
tive spectacle. It is divided, says a recent 
writer, ** almost equally (as to numbers) be- 
tween the two denominations; yet passes 
in Europe for an exclusively Protestant 
country. Why? Because her scientists, finan- 
ciers, poets, authors, are nearly all Protestant. *' 
Even a Catholic writer says: ** The Catholic 
parts of Germany seem smitten with the 
curse of barrenness." When men let pure 
religion slip, power, wealth and prosperity 
also slip away. 

Once Ireland stood even with her sister 
England. The latter embraced the gospel 
and leads the world. Poor Ireland had a 
corrupt superstition foisted upon her, and 
she grovels helpless in the dust. A striking 
contrast her history from that of Madagascar 
and the Sandwich Islands, raised by the power 
of the gospel from lowest savagery to a high 
civilization in a bare half century. 

Morality and civil order are well-known 
conditions of outward prosperity; but civil 
order rests upon morality and morality on 
religion. The spring of morality is the feel- 
ing of Qccountability. But accountability 

m 



The Reason of Suffering 

to whom? Of course to no other than the 
invisible judge. Destroy or darken the idea 
of God and the sense of obligation fades away 
and morality is undermined. The root of 
morality therefore is religion. Cut off the 
root and the plant dies. Destroy religion 
and morality perishes. And with morality 
go civil order, social harmony, mutual con- 
fidence; and in come idleness, vice, crime, 
unthrift and every species of degradation. 

Religion is the producer of prosperity. She 
is also no less truly its guard and preserver. 
The people of God are the truest benefactors 
of society. They plant and nurture the tree 
of prosperity ; other men do Httle more than 
shake down the fruit and take it to market. 
The work of the church stands foremost in 
relation to all the dearest interests of man. 
They who do that work wield forces that are 
as much more primary and essential than 
mere worldly agencies as they are more sub- 
tle and intangible. No philosophers, scien- 
tists, educators, inventors or legislators, merely 
as such, fill so high an office or contribute so 
bountifully even to this world's wealth. 

The gospel is no debtor to any com- 
munity. The debt is an untold sum on the 
other side of the ledger. Let the store, the 
shop, the factory, the college, the parliament, 
take off the hat to the church ; not the church 

180 



Piety and Prosperity 

to any of these. Let not her work ever be 
rated second to any, whether for this world 
or for the next, or receive anything less than 
our highest energies and most abundant 
benefactions. First things should be first; 
second things second. God's work and king- 
dom are first ; everything else second. 

The probability that this nation will con- 
tinue to enjoy the prosperity of the past 
century is simply the probability that she 
will cling to the earnestness of faith and 
purity of life which characterized the Pilgrim 
Fathers. ** Moody first and Mammon after- 
ward," was the witty remark of a Boston 
merchant some years ago. He had dis- 
cerned the fact that the business reverses of 
that period were the result of dishonest 
speculation, stock-jobbing and general reck- 
lessness. The formula is of universal appli- 
cation. It means simply piety first, and 
prosperity afterwards. 

In a certain country where no rain comes 
the land is fertilized by streams drawn from 
a central reservoir, which is directly under 
the eye and control of the ruler. Woe be to 
the district that rebels. Instantly the gate 
is shut, the stream is cut off, and barrenness 
and death cover the fields. Only one escape 
is possible — a return to allegiance, and a 
renewal of connection with the central reser- 

181 



The Reason of Suffering 

voir. All previous efforts to cultivate that 
soil will but increase its sterility. Our streams 
of secular blessings flow all from the great 
reservoir of religious faith and life. Rebels 
against God find those streams cut off. Nor 
can anything else avail but a direct and hearty 
return to fellowship with Him, and a renewal 
of connection with the central fount. On 
so solid a basis of fact rests the teaching of 
the New Testament that those who seek 
•first the kingdom of God and His righteous- 
ness will soon find all other needful things 
added unto them. 



182 



XI 
FAITH AND WORKS 

In the second chapter of his epistle the 
apostle James sets forth the vital neces- 
sity of works to justification. He argues the 
question briefly, yet conclusively, and clinches 
his argument by a most memorable example, 
that of Abraham. Having, as he thinks, 
proved his point, he takes it for granted that 
his readers will receive the truth, and con- 
cludes by saying, '' Ye see then how that by 
works a man is justified, and not by faith 
only." 

And yet the point is not very clear to 
most minds. A large number altogether fail 
to see it, nay, would even strongly object 
to any such statement if met with anywhere 
else than in Scripture. What have works to 
do with justification? is the prompt inquiry. 
Is it not said that the just shall live by faith? 
Has not Paul triumphantly proved that even 
Abraham while yet uncircumcised was justi- 
fied by faith? Has he not reiterated again 
and again the sentiment expressed so em- 
phatically in Rom. 3:28; "Therefore we 
conclude that a man is justified by faith 

183 



The Reason op Suffering 

without the deeds of the law**? And was not 
this doctrine of justification by faith the 
i^gis under which the primitive church 
fought her way to victory over Judaism on 
the one hand and pagan superstition on the 
other? Was it not the decline of it that 
ushered in the corruptions of popery? And 
was it not this same doctrine, as revived by 
Luther, that struck the keynote of the Refor- 
mation, and that constitutes the watch- 
word of Protestantism down to the present 
hour? 

If a man were to rise in any of our pulpits 
and commence his discourse by saying, " Justi- 
fication is by works " ; it is safe to say that 
the dullest of his hearers would be startled 
into attention. He would be quite sure to be 
greeted with a general stare of surprise. But 
if he commenced by saying ** Justification is 
by faith"; everyone would mentally re- 
spond, ** Of course it is " ; and not a few, past 
doubt, would immediately begin mentally 
to criticise the preacher for wasting a half 
hour in the needless discussion of a thread- 
bare theme. 

Yet, on the authority of this Scripture, 
one statement would be just as true and 
appropriate as the other. Both are true. 
Each is proper if not taken to exclude the 
other ; but each is false if so taken ; for justi- 

184 



Faith and Works 

fication is accomplished and secured not by 
faith alone or by works alone, but by faith 
and works in vital connection. 

The two depend on each other ; they are, 
in fact, but constituent parts of one living 
whole, so that severance is fatal to both. 

The thought, be it observed, is not that 
faith does one part of the work and works 
another; but rather that works are neces- 
sary to faith itself in order that it be true, 
genuine and efficacious. 

Nor is it merely as evidence that they are 
necessary as is sometimes too hastily said. 
For the evidences of a thing are not always 
a condition of its existence, as works are to 
faith. A thing may exist, or a fact may be 
a fact, even in the absence of any certain 
proof. The western continent existed before 
it was discovered by Columbus, but there 
were no evidences. Its existence was not 
suspected even by Columbus himself. The 
currents of magnetism that circle the globe 
and course through all matter, even through 
that of our own bodies, have existed from 
the creation, but there were no evidences of 
the fact till the most recent times. That 
man who recently gave himself up to the 
authorities of Maryland was a murderer 
before his confession, and had been for twenty 
years, but there was no evidence of the fact. 

185 



The Reason of Suffering 

His confession was required to make the fact 
apparent, but not at all necessary to the 
fact itself. 

Therefore to say that works are neces- 
sary to faith as an evidence is not sufficient 
to clear the matter up. Yet it approaches 
the true explanation and leads on to it. We 
reach it the moment we ask the further ques- 
tion, Why are works the necessary evidence 
of faith? Plainly they are so, not because 
of any accidental association, as a chance 
blood-spot might reveal a crime, but solely 
because they express and embody faith itself, 
and thus bring it into outward manifesta- 
tion. 

But when we have said this we have 
said much, and a whole series of analogies 
rises up before us to bear witness that all 
life struggles into existence only by strug- 
gling into outward manifestation. The em- 
bodiment is an essential condition and in- 
tegral part of the life itself. 

Who imagines that the life force in an 
acorn is equal to that in a full-grown tree? 
In the acorn it is feeble, unformed, im- 
mature; it is not even certain that it will 
ever be able to assert itself; it may prove 
incompetent or circumstances may prevent. 
And if so, it perishes and never is reckoned 
as having furnished a real example of vege- 

186 



Faith and Works 

table life. It is only by a great stretch of 
language that we say that the life of the oak 
is in the acorn. There is a vast difference 
between the two. In the long activity by 
which that life force has reached out and 
laid hold of the elements and out of them 
built up for itself the beautiful organism of 
the full-grown oak, in which it dwells, which 
it thrills with energy, and clothes with 
verdure, and by which it is manifested, it 
has itself developed and come to full strength. 
This was precisely the question on which 
everything turned, whether it could thus 
embody itself. The question of outward 
manifestation was nothing less than the 
question of life and death. 

Take an egg from the nest of a bird and 
examine its substance with the most powerful 
microscope and who can discover the throb- 
bing energy of animal life? In that ounce 
of fluid there is the germ, but not the thing. 
The life is still unformed because unembodied. 
The process by which out of that fluid the 
members of a real body are gradually formed 
is the process by which the life itself struggles 
into existence. The condition of the organism 
at any stage of the process is an accurate 
picture and index of the state of the life- 
force. The life and the body cannot be 
sundered. They are parts of one whole. If 

187 



The Reason of Suffering 

the latter fails to be organized the former 
fails to be. It can come into existence only 
by coming into manifestation. 

This is also true of the intellectual life. 
Capacity and power are not the same. The 
first is merely the germ of the second, which 
can come into real existence only by the 
works which embody it. No student, though 
it were Newton himself with all his capacity, 
ever became a proficient mathematician with- 
out severe and protracted study. He could 
never by a mere inward revery gain the power 
to solve the intricate problems of astro- 
nomical science. That wonderful power had 
to be born, to be wrought out from the 
capacity by real works. Laws had to be in- 
vestigated, formulas constructed, problems 
solved, calculations made; in a word, a 
whole body of mathematical science had to 
be built up, part by part, by the independent 
section of his own mind, before the power of 
the matured mathematician was really his. 
These laborious investigations by means of 
which he advanced, and which, if collected, 
would fill volumes, are but the works by 
which his capacity is at once exercised, 
embodied and transformed into power. 

And thus in higher departments. The 
mere capacity to become an artist or poet 
is very different from being one. Nor can 

188 



Faith and Works 

that capacity grow into power in any other 
way than by the actual production of some 
works of merit. Genius, to be such, must 
be embodied; and a single, earnest, success- 
ful effort will sometimes change the whole 
man and lift him to a higher plane. 

Think you Grant was the same man 
before and after the Vicksburg campaign? 
I tell you nay. The soldier was there, but 
the indomitable, victorious general came into 
being by the very fact of victories won 
through the intense exertion of powers before 
but half developed. 

Think you Milton was the same man 
before and after the writing of '' Paradise 
Lost "? Far from it. Before he was indeed 
a man of capacity, but the greatest of Eng- 
lish poets he was not yet. This he became 
only by the very efforts, intense and pro- 
tracted, by which that wonderful work was 
produced. Those efforts were the birth- 
throes of his power. He rose by them to a 
height wholly above his former self. He 
even lost his own mental reckoning and 
thought lightly of the work when done, so 
much had he outgrown his first conceptions. 
His ideal had advanced ; his power had burst 
into fullness of vigor; and, under the in- 
fluence of this new and exalted consciousness 
he sold for a few pounds the immortal work 

189 



The Reason of Suffering 

by which that power had struggled at once 
into being and manifestation. 

It is needless to pursue the matter further. 
We have found the law, and it is universal; 
the universal law of birth and of growth, by 
which it is fixed that a capacity to live can 
struggle into life only by works, only by 
taking a body, only by forcing its way into 
some outward form of manifestation. 

And thus in religion. The capacity for 
faith is not faith but merely the germ. It 
becomes faith only in the exercise, and that 
exercise is the work that expresses and 
reveals it. Obedience is, therefore, the out- 
ward half, the substance, embodiment and 
perfecting of faith; without it there is not 
only no evidence of faith, but no faith ; there 
is only a germ which if left alone perishes 
without effect. 

Let a man, for example, advise me to 
deposit my money in a certain bank, and 
my first impulse is to do so, for confidence is 
natural; but that impulse is not faith, but 
only the germ ; the real faith or trust will be 
my action. Until I obey there is no trust; 
the impulse is checked and held in abeyance, 
and I risk nothing, or trust nothing to my 
friend's counsel. The bank may prosper or 
break, it will not affect me ; but the moment 
I obey, I trust ; I risk my hard-earned dollars 

190 



Faith and Works 

on my friend's word, commit them, as it 
were, into his hands, and make or lose ac- 
cording as his counsel proves sound or the 
contrary. Hence faith, as one writer has 
well said, "realizes itself (becomes real, actual, 
genuine, efficacious) in the will." The actual 
deed is the full-formed faith; all that pre- 
cedes is the germinal impulse. The works 
of faith are evidences of faith solely because 
they are an inseparable part of it. 

The apples on your trees in June are not 
only small but worthless. They are immature 
and undeveloped; they are apples only in 
germ. But when a few weeks more of cloud 
and sun have passed over them, the wonder- 
ful energy hidden within them will have 
passed into exercise, will have taken on as 
its body the full form and luscious juices of 
the matured fruit, and then only have you 
anything of value. Faith without works is 
an apple in the blossom; merely a germ, of 
no value or account in its present state. 
Faith brought out in works is the ripened 
fruit, beautiful, full-formed, and of great 
price. So we see how that " by works a man 
is justified and not by faith only." 

Does not Paul, however, teach a different 
doctrine? In the passage quoted at the out- 
set, viz.: "Therefore we conclude that a 
man is justified by faith without the works 

191 



The Reason op Suffering 

of the law," does he not emphatically ex- 
clude works as forming any part of a justi- 
fying righteousness? The answer is, this is 
certainly impossible. Paul is the last man 
to teach such a view. No one insisted more 
strenuously than he upon the necessity of 
practical righteousness. 

It is Paul who says: " Mortify (make 
dead) your members {i.e. carnal desires) that 
are upon the earth." It is Paul who quotes: 
** Come out from among them and be sepa- 
rate, saith the Lord, and touch not the 
unclean thing, and I will receive you." It 
is Paul who exhorts ; " Having such promises, 
dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from 
all filthiness of flesh and spirit, perfecting 
holiness in the fear of God "; it is Paul who 
exclaims. ** This is a faithful saying, and 
these things I will that thou affirm con- 
stantly, that they which have believed in God 
might be careful to maintain good works." 
" For we must all appear before the judg- 
ment seat of Christ; that every one may 
receive the things done in his body, accord- 
ing to that he hath done, whether it be good 
or bad." 

Manifestly Paul is not behind James or 
any other writer in the emphasis he places 
on good works. What works then are they 
which he does repudiate? The phrase he 

192 



Faith and Works 

uses (and it is peculiar to himself) will readily 
suggest. It is not ' ' good works, ' ' nor ' * works, ' ' 
but " works of the law " (or deeds of 
the law — the same in the original) or 
more strictly like the Greek '* law- works "; 
by which Paul means ceremonies, formal 
observances, rites and technicalities, prac- 
,tised with the absurd idea (not yet weeded 
out from certain branches of the church) 
that they are in themselves, wholly apart 
from the motive of the doer, pleasing to God, 
and constituting a valid claim, or merit, on 
the part of the doer. In a word, it was 
Pharisaic ritualism which Paul was con- 
demning, and not at all the good works of 
faith, love and obedience. 

No doubt Paul would condemn all acts 
of whatever name that are done with such a 
motive, but as a matter of fact he had his 
eye on ritualism. This is placed beyond a 
cavil by his epistle to the Galatians written 
for the purpose of elucidating this subject. 
He says, **0 foolish Galatians, who hath 
bewitched you, that ye should not obey the 
truth? This only would I learn of you, re- 
ceived ye the spirit by the works of the law 
(law-works) or by the hearing of faith ? How 
then turn ye again to the weak and beggarly 
elements whereunto ye desire again to be 
in bondage?" The ** works" meant, there- 

193 



The Reason of Suffering 

fore, are those from which we are wholly ex- 
cused and delivered; of course not then, 
works of obedience; and now Paul tells us 
what they are. " Ye observe days, and 
months, and times, and years (ritualistic 
observances). I am afraid of you, lest I 
have bestowed upon you labor in vain." 

If we turn to the celebrated passage in 
the fourth chapter of Romans the same 
thing is apparent from what is said of Abra- 
ham. Speaking of the righteousness of faith 
Paul asks; *' How was it then reckoned? 
When he was in circumcision or in uncircum- 
cision? Not in circumcision, but in uncir- 
cumcision." Circumcision, therefore, not 
moral obedience; circumcision with all that 
it stood for, that is the whole Jewish ritual, 
was that which Paul was setting aside; in 
short, the righteousness of the Pharisees of 
which Paul himself was once such a zealous 
devotee. 

What does Christ say of it? ** Except 
your righteousness shall exceed the righteous- 
ness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in 
no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
And what was their righteousness? Works 
of faith and love? — integrity, moral purity 
and obedience? On the contrary, in these 
things they were wholly deficient. Turn to 
the 23rd chapter of Matthew, where Christ 

194 



Faith and Works 

accuses them of pride, vain-glory, self-seek- 
ing, hypocrisy, dishonesty, extortion, oppres- 
sion, of all uncleanness and impurity, and 
sums up the matter in the memorable words : 
" Woe unto you Scribes, Pharisees, hypo- 
crites, for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and 
cummin, and have omitted the weightier 
matters of the law, judgment, mercy and 
faith." So far from condemning the Phar- 
isees for any really good works, he condemned 
them for the lack of them, just as he will 
condemn all others. 

Their righteousness was a mere pretence, 
a mere make-believe. It was a part acted, a 
dramatic performance, a mere imitation or 
mock righteousness, an ostentatious perform- 
ance of certain ablutions, fasts, recitations of 
prayers, offerings of herbs and the like, on 
the theory that these things in themselves, 
irrespective of the motives and character of 
the doers, are pleasing and meritorious in 
God's sight; just as a certain number of 
dollars would be valuable irrespective of the 
character of the man who should loan them 
to me; and they thought that they were 
thus making God their debtor, as I should 
be to the man in question. All acts, how- 
ever proper in themselves, done with such a 
motive are worthless before God. The motive 
should be not to exalt self and lay God under 

195 



The Reason op Suffering 

an obligation (an impossibility), but humbly 
to do duty, obey conscience and right and 
honor God. 

Look at yonder tree withered and stripped 
of its foliage, as it has been for a whole year. 
It is a dead tree, you say, for you reason that 
if there were life it would manifest itself in 
bud and leaf, since only in manifestation can 
life continue to be, and you reason correctly. 
But get a French artist and have that tree 
painted and varnished, and covered all over 
with wax buds and leaves exactly like the 
natural, and what have you? Simply a 
dead tree dressed up in an imitation foliage. 
Such is the Pharisaic righteousness: A mere 
sham and outside show where the inner life 
is wanting. A righteousness that is all 
works is no better than one without works. 
The first is Pharisaism; the second, mys- 
ticism, and both are condemned. Faith and 
works must not be sundered. Both perish 
under the infliction. They must exist in 
vital connection, the first as the spirit and 
motive, the second as the body and sub- 
stance, and together they are life spiritual 
and eternal. 

There are, in fact, four species of works 
mentioned in Scripture: (1) Evil works; acts 
that are wrong both in form and motive. 

(2) Law-works ; (or dead works) ; acts, 

196 



Faith and Works 

mostly of a ritual character, proper in form, 
but done with the pretence of laying God 
under an obligation; here the false motive 
renders the act abominable before God. 

(3) Proprieties; acts morally correct, but 
done merely from natural impulse, or the 
influence of circumstances. Such acts are 
neutral. They are not bad; yet as they 
spring from no positive choice of the right, 
they have in themselves no positive righteous- 
ness. 

(4) Good works; the two classes of acts 
last named done in humility, from a positive 
motive of trust, reverence, and obedience 
toward God. This is the righteousness of 
faith — a real righteousness proceeding from 
and embodying faith; '* So we see, how that 
by works a man is justified and not by faith 
only." 

And thus is manifest what Paul means by 
saying that faith is imputed, counted, or 
reckoned as righteousness. Paul means, not 
one half of faith, either the inner or the outer, 
but faith in its full extent as including the 
works of faith or obedience. Faith in Scrip- 
ture is a broad term. It means belief, trust, 
confidence, " good faith " or fidelity, and 
loyal obedience. 

True, Paul's thought is often turned on 
the inner, spiritual side of faith, but he 

197 



The Reason of Suffering 

never sunders that from the outer, any 
more than Moses excludes the human body 
when he says, " No soul of you shall eat 
blood." It would be impossible for the soul 
apart from the body, to eat blood; but no 
more impossible than that faith without 
works should save a man. 

When we designate man by naming the 
inner part, we always understand that the 
outer is included, because we know well that 
the soul can come into life and continue to 
live in this world only by the help of the 
body. Just so when the Bible speaks of faith, 
works are included, for faith can be born and 
live and be efficacious only in works. 

Therefore there is no point to the question 
raised by some, as to whether sanctification 
is by faith or works. It must be by both 
or not at all. Obedience is a part and a 
necessary part of faith. And when those 
who emphasize faith allow themselves to 
disparage obedience, they ignorantly and 
unwittingly, but most effectually, under- 
mine their own teaching. The faith they 
uphold with one hand they subvert with the 
other. Great confusion and damage result 
from leaning too far either to the one side or 
the other. 

Sanctification proceeds just as a man 
walks by putting alternately one foot forward 

198 



Faith and Works 

and then the other. Now faith is in the fore- 
ground, and the soul presses nearer to God 
and new spiritual light is received. This 
new light reveals new faults and depravities, 
and immediately works must come to the 
front; the will must act; and the unclean- 
ness seen must be put away; and so on till 
we stand blameless before God. But what 
if a man should insist on doing his walking 
with one foot? Keep putting the same 
foot, whether right or left, forward step after 
step, while keeping the other stationary? 
He would soon present an awkward and 
eccentric attitude, and must finally come to 
the ground. Precisely the fate of those sen- 
timental mystics on the one hand and those 
formal moralists on the other, who insist on 
doing it all by faith alone or works alone, not 
" seeing that by works a man is justified and 
not by faith only." 

The subject also enables us to see the 
complete consistency of the Scriptural repre- 
sentations of what constitutes a genuine 
righteousness. They all coalesce in this one 
thought; practical righteousness standing as 
the necessary embodiment and only proof 
of that which is inward. 

Hence the fact that moral purity, justice, 
honesty, truth, benevolence, in a word, practi- 
cal obedience to the divine will and commands, 

199 



The Reason of Suffering 

is everyw^here urged as the indispensable 
condition of the favor of God; to cite the 
examples of which would be to transcribe 
the greater part of the whole Bible. ** Say 
ye to the righteous, it shall be well with 
him; but say to the wicked, it shall be ill 
with him," is the sentiment of all Scripture. 

Hence the fact that every description of 
the righteous man (of which there are many) 
gives principal prominence to practical piety, 
as in Psalm 15: 

*' Lord who shall abide in thy tabernacle? 
Who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that 
walketh uprightly, and worketh righteous- 
ness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. 
He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor 
doeth evil to his neighbor, nor taketh up a 
reproach against his neighbor : In whose eye 
a vile person is condemned ; but he honoreth 
them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth 
to his own hurt and changeth not. He that 
putteth not out his money to usury, nor 
taketh reward against the innocent. He 
that doeth these things shall never be moved. " 

Hence the fact that practical righteous- 
ness is set forth as the only sure ground of 
confidence in character. " Let no man de- 
ceive you," says John. '* He that doeth right- 
eousness is righteous. " " He that committeth 
sin is of the devil." And again, ** Hereby we 

200 



Faith and Works 

do know that we know Him, if we keep His 
commandments. He that saith I know Him, 
and keepeth not His commandments is a 
liar and the truth is not in him. ' ' 

Hence, too, the fact that actual deeds 
will be the test at the bar of the final judge. 
''Not every one," says Christ, "that saith 
unto me. Lord, Lord, shall enter the king- 
dom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of 
my Father which is in heaven." ** Many 
shall say unto me in that day, Lord, Lord, 
have we not prophesied in thy name and in 
thy name cast out devils, and in thy name 
done many wonderful works? Then will I 
profess unto them, I never knew you, depart 
from me ye that work iniquity." *' For the 
wrath of God is revealed from heaven against 
all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men ": 
*' who will render to every man according to 
his deeds." " Behold I come quickly, and 
my reward is with me, to give to every man 
according as his work shall be." 

Hence, finally, the solemn warning which 
closes and enforces that most wonderful of 
all discourses, the sermon on the mount; 
** Therefore, whosoever heareth these sayings 
of mine and doeth them, I will liken him 
unto a wise man, which built his house upon 
a rock; and the rain descended, and the 
floods came, and the winds blew, and beat 

201 



The Reason of Suffering 

upon that house ; and it fell not ; for it was 
founded upon a rock. And everyone that 
heareth these sayings of mine and doeth 
them not, shall be likened unto a foolish 
man, which built his house upon the sand; 
and the rain descended and the floods came, 
and the winds blew, and beat upon that 
house; and it fell; and great was the fall 
of it." 

It is evident that the faith that will 
stand the final test is that which is expressed 
and embodied in works. 



202 



XII 
DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY 

It is a striking statement of Scripture that, 
in the matter of our salvation, it is God that 
works within us '' both to will and to do of 
His good pleasure." At first thought this 
would seem to leave us nothing to do. But 
on the contrary the sacred writer puts this 
statement forward as a reason why we should 
" work out our own salvation* with fear and 
trembling." 

This is a paradox that has vexed men's 
minds from the earliest times, not only in 
relation to spiritual matters but also in regard 
to all the ordinary concerns of life. And yet 
a solution is contained in the contrasted 
terms of the two statements. If men were 
called upon to work in the same sense and 
way in which God works it would indeed be 
impossible to solve the problem. But such 
is not the case ; for God is said to " work in " 
us, what we are told to " work out." With 
this fact in mind the proposition that we 
should work because God works is really one 
most familiar. It is a general law. In all 

♦Phil. 2: 12, 13. 

203 



The Reason of Suffering 

experience we meet it. Compelled as we are 
to admit that all good comes from God, and 
that His is the glory, we yet find that His 
working is such as not to preclude but in- 
clude and necessitate ours. The gifts He 
bestows are always gifts in the germ; it is 
ours to develop and thus possess them. 

God gives us the earth as the means of 
supplying our physical wants ; but how little 
do we find prepared to our hand! All that 
we need the earth will produce; but it must 
be wrought out, '' worked out " from it by 
patient toil, before it is available. 

Food and raiment we must have; but 
we do not find them ready for use. We find 
the herb bearing the seed; but corn and 
cotton are not cloth and bread. God gives 
the corn, but it must be cultivated. He 
works in the germ. His power is present in 
the mysterious process by which it springs 
up, grows, multiplies and matures; but it 
must be cultivated. 

The work is His, but it is also ours. Through 
our working, as one of the agencies necessary, 
God completes His work. There is a blank 
in His plan for our agency to fill, and without 
it the plan fails. Our agency is one link in 
the chain of means, as much so as the agency 
of the sunlight. If this link is wanting the 
chain is broken as effectually as if any other 

204 



Divine and Human Agency 

link should fail — as if, for example, the sun 
should fail to shine. God's working implies, 
includes, invites ours. Because He works, 
we work. Because He causes the corn to 
germinate, therefore we plant, dress, harvest 
and prepare for the table the good gift of His 
providence. We " work out " with care and 
diligence the means of life, because they have 
already been inwrought by God in the sub- 
stance and nature of the vegetable products. 

In like manner are supplied our higher 
wants. Wood and stone and iron and coal 
are not houses, or factories or machinery. 
They are the raw material from which the 
latter must be worked out. God has supplied 
them ; they are good gifts ; but gifts only in 
germ ; they must be developed. 

Gold is nothing in the bowels of the 
earth. Marble is nothing in the depths of 
the quarry. Cedar is nothing on the slopes 
of Lebanon. Yet let these gifts, inwrought 
by God in the very substance of the earth, 
be worked out by men; let the gold, the 
marble, the cedar, be dug, quarried, shaped 
by the labor of man; and the temple of 
Solomon will crown Mount Zion. 

Yet when it is finished the whole work is 
God's; for the powers of man employed in 
its building were created by Him and sus- 
tained by Him. God worked within the 

205 



The Reason of Suffering 

hidden processes and laboratories of nature, 
and men worked out, gave outward form and 
development to the one divine purpose. 
God's working included and justified man's, 
and both conspired to finish the work which 
yet was wholly God's. 

Plainly the law that God's working in- 
vites and includes ours is applicable to all 
material gifts. The germs of such gifts are 
abundant, but they must be developed. 
God has packed the earth full of them, but 
not one of them is brought to perfection in- 
dependently of our action. What God works 
in the processes of nature we must work out 
in order to possess and actually enjoy. 

And so in the matter of mental endow- 
ments. Here too God's gifts are gifts in 
germ, and must be wrought out. God does 
not make men scholars, artists, poets, phi- 
losophers, apart from their own activity but 
only through it. He gives the capacity, and 
supplies the impulse ; He works within both 
to will and to do; but they must work or 
fail. The willing and doing is His work but 
their act. The talent, the skill, the power, 
which God works within, they are incited and 
required to work out for themselves. God's 
working is the ground and reason for theirs. 

The eminent scholar became such because 
God wrought within him great abilities. But 

206 



Divine and Human Agency 

what of his own action ? What of the student 's 
lonely years and patient self-denial? What 
of the days and nights of toil? What of 
the study and the classroom? What of the 
battle with Latin and Greek and mathematics ? 
What of the volumes of science and history 
and philosophy through which he has labored ? 
What of the long and weary way through 
school, and academy and college and pro- 
fessional study, in toiling through which a 
third part of his life has slipped away? 

God worked within him, but he worked 
also. God gave the capacity and supplied the 
inspiration ; and this divine inworking served 
as the ground of those efforts by which he 
worked out his own eminence. 

In this field, it is well understood that 
God's working is the ground and reason for 
ours. If a man proposes to fit himself for a 
profession for which he has no talent, the 
capacity for which God does not work within 
him, he is advised on all hands not to attempt 
it. But to that for which he has a talent he 
is encouraged to devote all his energies. God's 
working within him a certain aptitude is the 
best reason why he should set about working 
it out. 

Only on this ground can he hope to succeed. 
It is vain for a man to press forward where 
God does not lead. " The poet is born not 

207 



The Reason of Suffering 

made.*' If God does not work within a man 
the appropriate faculty, the would be artist 
will prove but a dauber. But if God gives 
the capacity, the taste, the inspiration, if 
He works within to will and to do, it only 
remains that the man himself work out the 
endowment by patient toil, and the paintings 
of a Raphael or the strains of a Milton delight 
and astonish the world. 

The same law holds in other fields. In 
that sphere of experience opened before us in 
the social state we find it in force. Its il- 
lustrations here are in truth most striking, 
though often unobserved. They escape our 
notice because we forget that the social state 
in its healthful developments, is God's ar- 
rangement. He has established it. Its laws 
are His laws. The forces that move, mould, 
control and palpitate through it, are forces 
created, implanted by Him; He works in 
them, and He so works as to open before us 
various paths of honor and usefulness. The 
social system with all its laws God has or- 
dained for the special end to furnish an arena 
of healthful activity; to open a field broad 
enough to give scope and play, training and 
use, to all varieties of talent bestowed on 
men. 

Hence the different orders in society, the 
rising grades of which it consists, the various 

208 



Divine and Human Agency 

posts of honor and influence which invite our 
seeking. These are legitimate developments 
of God's plan. The dream of some of abolish- 
ing all distinctions, and reducing society to 
a dead level is the wildest of dreams. God's 
kingdom is built not on sameness, but on 
variety; not on equality, absolutely speak- 
ing, but on subordination. Neither in this 
world nor in that which is to come will His 
subjects all be in one rank. Far from it. 
Hereafter as now, they will appear in different 
ranks, in rising grades of honor, power, 
glory, service, through which in succession 
it will be the privilege of the redeemed to 
climb up forever. It is God's will therefore 
that men should rise in the social scale. To 
this end He works. The social state opens 
before us the door of a successful career. It 
offers us chances, opportunities, facilities of 
winning respect, honor, influence, and in- 
vites our seeking. But they must be sought. 
God works to uplift us; therefore we must 
work. This is well understood. None but 
the fool expects to rise in the social scale, 
without earnest effort. Because God works, 
men work. They see the prize He holds out, 
and therefore they work. His working invites, 
encourages, justifies theirs; His working to 
lift them does not exclude theirs, but includes 
and requires it. 

209 



The Reason of Suffering 

Says the proverb, " The gods help thofle 
who help themselves "; yes, and they help 
no others. By the laws of society God works 
to lift men, but the sluggard never rises. Spite 
of his dreams, and spite of God's working, the 
slothful man sinks and is forgot. 

The gifts of power, influence, usefulness, 
are gifts in germ, and must be developed by 
patient endeavor. They are inwrought in 
society and must be wrought out as surely as 
gold must be dug from the mine. God has 
worked them into the social mine ; but we must 
work them out in order to have them. 

The fact that God works is the best reason 
for our working. His working invites ours. 
In that mine are crowns for us all. God is 
liberal. His plan is all-embracing. No one 
of His subjects but has his opportunity, if he 
will but seek and use it. For each one of 
us there are in waiting crowns of usefulness 
and honor, if we will " work them out.'* 

But take a higher view. The social or- 
ganism is, in a real sense, one whole, an 
integer ; more truly such than any individual. 
As such it has its destiny. A high career is 
appointed for it, and a lofty goal toward 
which it must move. That career is to be- 
come perfected by a thorough renovation; 
and that goal is the purity, blessedness, glory, 
of the new heaven and the new earth. 

210 



Divine and Human Agency 

Toward this goal God is urging it. He 
works within it with the mightiest powers at 
His command. All the most potent forces 
known to the universe He puts in action and 
sets throbbing and beating through every 
part. His word, His spirit, His son ; His judg- 
ments of terror and mercy; the whole order 
of His providences ; all these are put in requi- 
sition ; and these are but a part of the great 
network of causes by which He is working 
mightily within it. 

But what of its own action? Is that pre- 
cluded by God's action? Is it merely passive 
in the hands of God ? Taking our stand for a 
moment at an outside point, and looking back 
over the past of its progress, what is the 
principal feature in its own relation to that 
progress? What is its attitude as it climbs 
slowly up the steeps of improvement, material, 
intellectual, moral? Is it indifference, pas- 
sivity, sluggishness? On the contrary it is 
activity; activity the most intense and un- 
flagging. We behold it toiling, working its 
way up the steep by painful effort. Each step 
in advance costs untold labor. Each stage 
of its progress is through ages of toil, thought, 
strife, commotion, agony, tears and blood. 
History testifies that all its progress on every 
side has been through its own intense ac- 
tivity of suffering and toil. It has worked 

211 



The Reason op Suffering 

out its own melioration, advancement, reno- 
vation, because God has worked in it. 

The drones and the sluggards have been 
dead weights. They have been obstacles in 
the way, over which the chariot wheels of 
progress had to be dragged, though it crushed 
them in the dust. Only the workers have 
contributed anything to the world's progress. 
They only have had any real part in that 
progress. They only have held their place in 
the real body in which God works advance- 
ment, and they only will have a place in that 
body when finally perfected. All else will be 
sloughed off as decayed and refuse matter. 

There is no place in God's universe for the 
sluggard. God works that we may work. 
His working includes, invites, contemplates 
ours. The man that refuses to work soon 
finds himself an outcast from the great system 
in which God graciously works. The reno- 
vation which God works in society, society 
must itself work out and does. To the social 
organism viewed as a whole the words of the 
sacred writer apply with literal exactness; 
" Work out your own salvation with fear and 
trembling, for it is God that worketh within 
you, both to will and to do of His good 
pleasure." 

These words therefore no longer express 
a paradox but set forth a consistent plan. 

212 



Divine and Human Agency 

God's working to save us does not preclude 
but includes our working. Sovereign as it 
is, comprehensive as it is, it still can reach 
its end only through our activity. He works 
salvation in our hearts, but it is salvation 
in the germ, and must be worked out by us 
to become effectual. God works that we 
may work and work with success. His 
action invites ours, holds it in view and aims 
to secure it. A part of His working is to 
make us work, to get us to act. He can 
save us only in and through our activity. 

God requires obedience, active obedience. 
** If ye love me, keep my commandments." 
*' This is the love of God that ye keep His 
commandments." All the elements of the 
Christian life are elements of action, and 
that action must be ours. They are God's 
work but our acts ; and they cannot be 
worked save as they are acted. God cannot 
save us, if we fail to act as He commands and 
impels us to act. 

Torpor, neglect, religious apathy and in- 
difference are fatal to a man's hope of a salva- 
tion that must be worked out. '* Woe to 
them that are at ease in Zion," is the voice of 
the Spirit. " Tremble, ye that are at ease ; be 
troubled, ye careless ones; for the vintage 
shall fail, the gathering shall not come." 
The hoped-for salvation will not be reached 

213 



The Reason of Suffering 

by the slothful and negligent; it must be 
worked out. 

Here also appears our responsibility as 
those called to labor for the uplifting of 
humanity. That calling is the proof that 
God would work through us. He impels us 
to act that through our activity His kingdom 
may advance. Our activity is necessary. 
There is a blank in God's plan which only 
that activity can fill. 

When a man builds a house he does not 
expect to do all the work with his own hands. 
His plan includes the activity of many others 
skilled in such labor. He must induce them 
by suitable means — by suitable offers of 
compensation — to put their hands to the 
work, or it will not be done. Through their 
activity he builds his house, and only thus 
can it be done. He works in them by the 
appeal he makes to their need and desire of 
what he offers, and they work out the desired 
result. 

Thus God, in building up His kingdom, 
works through His people. He commands, 
impels them to act that through their activity 
as a means He may save men. If they labor 
and do their whole duty His cause will advance, 
but not otherwise. It is difficult to conceive 
of a stronger motive for fidelity in service. 

But further and more directly this sub- 

214 



Divine and Human Agency 

ject sets in clearest light the great peril of 
living in neglect of personal religion. Neglect 
is fatal; it interposes an effectual barrier to 
God's gracious working: God loves men and 
is working to save them. He makes all 
needful provision. He arranges all the means 
and influences necessary. He moves upon 
them. He works within them to will and to 
do, mightily impelling them to right action. 
They have only to yield to those divine im- 
pulsions and salvation is theirs; but their 
refusal, their neglect to act, wholly defeats 
God's gracious design. 

For illustration look at yonder engineer 
standing idle upon his engine. The engine is 
perfect in all its parts and the steam is up; 
yet it is motionless on the track and directly 
in the way of passing trains. He has only to 
open a single valve and it will take him out 
of danger, but he neglects to do it. He did 
not make the engine. It was out of his power 
to do that. No one man could do it. It is 
the product of the thought and skill of many 
generations; the most mighty and perfect 
of human inventions; and yet wholly at his 
service if he will but use it; but he neglects 
to do it! He is in imminent peril. The ex- 
press train is due ; already its roar is plainly 
heard as it comes thundering down the 
track. A moment more and the crash will 

215 



The Reason op Suffering 

come and he will be hurled into eternity, 
and yet he stands idle I 

This is a fair representation of everyone 
living in the neglect of religion. Redemption 
is God's work, not man's. He has prepared 
it. He has made the provision, and arranged 
the forces and influences necessary. He is 
constantly influencing men to act. They 
have only to yield, to open the valve of the 
will, to cease to neglect, and begin to act as 
God is impelling them to act, and they will 
be rescued, but otherwise it needs no prophet 
to foretell the result. There is one question 
from the lips of a sacred writer that can 
never be answered: *' How shall we escape 
if we neglect so great salvation? '* 



210 



XIII 

PERILS OF THE CENSORIOUS 
TEMPER 

Censoriousness as a habit received its 
severest castigation at the hands of Christ. 
His simile of the mote and the beam has 
proved so effective that it has become a 
common phrase of speech ; and the associated 
aphorism ** Judge not that ye be not judged " 
has achieved the popularity of a proverb. 

Yet the subject needs careful handling. 
It is not judging of every species that is to be 
shunned, but only that which has behind it 
a censorious temper, unfavorable judging, 
judging in the sense of condemning ; for this 
is a sense in which the word is frequently 
used. 

It is to be noticed further that the thing 
forbidden is judging persons, not acts. Acts 
and principles in themselves considered we 
ought to judge, and must to avoid being 
contaminated. We are commanded to do 
so. " Abhor that which is evil, cleave to 
that which is good," says Scripture; but 
how can we do this without determining what 
is evil and what is good? And therefore 

217 



The Reason of Suffering 

Scripture adds more directly, in another 
place, " Prove all things and hold fast that 
which is good ": that is, judge all things and 
treat them according to their true character. 

No duty is clearer or more important. 
Our safety depends upon it. It is a great part 
of the vigilance needful in a world where sin 
abounds. Evil hides itself. It lurks in 
hidden recesses. It puts on masks, and loves 
to present itself under the form of good. 
The devil always has an apology for what he 
asks of us. He never lacks for excuses. He 
can quote Scripture like an apostle, and 
sham piety like the prince of hypocrites, as 
he is. He can put on the guise of the most 
disinterested benevolence and regard for truth, 
and even transform himself into an angel of 
light ! His greatest power is here. He works 
by stratagems ; lies are his principal weapon, 
as they were in the garden ; he first deceives 
us and then destroys us. 

It is the victory of evil to be hid. If it 
can lurk under some cover; if it can remain 
undetected, unrecognized as evil; if it can 
pass under the guise of something better, or 
get itself called by a softer name, its triumph 
is sure. It is often the hardest part of our 
task to tear off these covers and unmask the 
devil; to detect and drag forth sin from its 
secret lurking places, hold it up to view in 

218 



Perils of the Censorious Temper 

its true character, and get it called by its 
right name. 

Hence there is little danger of too great 
care in discriminating between right and 
wrong, in judging of the moral character of 
acts, principles and courses of conduct; and 
there is little danger of being too severe in 
our condemnation of those that are wrong. 
We could not surpass the Bible in this re- 
spect. No language can be more scathing, 
no denunciation more withering, than that 
recorded in Scripture against any and every 
form of moral evil. 

But judging acts and judging persons are 
very different things. The character of an 
act, in a general sense, may be easily fixed; 
not so the character or desert of the person 
who does it. This is a far more difficult 
matter. The problem has many elements. 
A thousand different items must enter into the 
calculation. We must know a man's history, 
temper, surroundings. We must know what 
his education has been; what his prejudices 
are, what his temptations are. We must 
know his mental and physical constitution. 
We must know what infirmities of mind and 
body beset him. We must know the strength 
of his will, or its weakness; the character 
of his companions, associates, relatives, and 
the influence they exert upon him. In short 

219 



The Reason of Suffering 

we must know his whole inner and outer 
life, past and present, in order to fix his 
character and desert. 

The act in question is but a single element 
in the account and a very uncertain index 
of guilt. The same act is far from indicating 
the same measure of guilt. In the same per- 
son even, at different times, it does not do 
so ; much less in different persons under cir- 
cumstances wholly diverse. Hence it is 
wholly a different thing to judge the act from 
what it is to judge the person. The first we 
must not hesitate to do ; but when we come 
to the person we ought to hesitate, be chari- 
table, allow the man the benefit of the doubt 
which really exists, and suspend judgment; 
that is, not judge, but defer to judge, for- 
bear to judge in any positive, unqualified 
manner. 

The general reason for this rule is ex- 
pressed in the words '' that ye be not judged." 
This implies that if we do what is forbidden 
we shall be liable to be condemned. It 
reminds us that there is a judgment bar to 
which we and all others are amenable, and 
brings to view the fact that judging, in the 
sense explained, is a prerogative God has 
reserved to Himself alone. It does not belong 
to us. It does not befit us. God has never 
committed or permitted to us any such office. 

220 



Perils of the Censorious Temper 

" The Father," it is said, " hath committed 
all judgment unto the Son." God, the Son, 
is the sole and only judge of all the earth. 
' There is one lawgiver," says James, " and 
one judge who is able to save and destroy." 
** Who art thou," asks Paul — "who judgest 
another man's servant? To his own master 
he standeth or falleth." Hence when we 
assume to judge we step out of our province 
and fall at once under condemnation. We 
are walking in the dark and sure to go wrong ; 
meddling with things too high for us and 
certain to do injury. The thing attempted 
is a thing wholly unbecoming to us, and 
wholly beyond our province. 

Our ignorance of conditions unfits us for it. 

To judge a person and fix his guilt with 
reference to a single act, requires, as has been 
said, the consideration of a vast network of 
circumstances usually beyond our knowledge. 
Notice a few points : — 

In the first place we know not how far a 
given act may truly represent a man at the 
time it is done. 

Character has many sides; some acts 
exhibit one side ; some another. Few indeed 
manifest all. And often in every experience 
acts occur which do not at all represent the 
real character in its main features. Sudden 
emotion, abstraction of thought, sharp provo- 

221 



The Reason of Suffering 

cation, are often the occasion of acts of which 
the men themselves would hardly have 
thought themselves capable. 

A miser may sometimes be charitable. A 
sudden appeal working upon the feelings has 
often been known to win from a penurious 
man a gift which he afterward regretted. 
That act misrepresented him. The act was 
charitable, but he was not charitable; he 
was simply sentimental for the moment. 
Spite of the generous act as it was in itself, 
he is still and always an ungenerous man. 

And so when a man, suddenly provoked, 
answers with a blow, it does not follow that 
he is revengeful. The act looks so, but it is 
not conclusive. It may not represent his 
real character. It may be regretted and 
repudiated by the man himself five minutes 
after. The act may be judged , but to judge 
him by the act would be culpably rash. 

Peter's denial of his master was an act of 
this kind. It did not represent him. He 
was under the influence of a sudden panic. 
Behold him in the outer court as he trembles 
and cowers in the presence of a maid -servant. 
How unlike the man who drew his sword 
against a hundred Roman soldiers? Hear 
his ready oaths. How unlike the man who 
had preached righteousness through all Judea 
and cast out devils in the name of Jesus! 

222 



Perils of the Censorious Temper 

And that triple denial: Is it possible that 
it comes from the lips of the man who an 
hour before had exclaimed, ** Lord, I am 
ready to go with thee both into prison and 
to death! " 

Suppose we had now only this single 
scene recorded of Peter's life by which to 
judge of his character; how utterly unlike 
the truth would be the judgment formed. 
That act wholly misrepresents him. He ap- 
pears like another man. In one sense he is 
another man. The true Peter does not appear 
in that act, but only a miserable caricature. 
He was under a great stress of temptation. 
It was one of the most fearful moments of 
history. Jesus himself calls it ' * the hour and 
power of darkness." Evil was triumphant. 
The devil for a moment had unwonted power. 
The better elements of Peter's character were 
overborne, paralyzed, as it were, by the sud- 
den onset, the worst elements stimulated and 
brought to the front, and, for a moment, Satan 
compelled him to present a miserable travesty 
of himself. But his recovery was as sudden 
as his fall. One look from his Lord recalled 
the true man, and a flood of bitter tears 
testified to his deep repentance. 

His case was extreme. But acts of a 
similar nature, which represent not the real 
character, but only a passing mood, are 

223 



The Reason op Suffering 

common in every experience, and judgment 
must be suspended. We do not speak ill 
of a growing tree because some of its branches 
are swayed from their place by a sudden 
gust of wind. They will soon be in their 
place again. There is no proper deformity 
in the tree. Yet it would be just as reasonable 
to hold every tree deformed which we chance 
to see moved by a breeze, as to judge men 
by the class of actions of which we are speak- 
ing. When we consider in the light of our 
own experience how common such acts are 
and must be in a stage of training and growth 
like the present, we shall begin to feel the force 
of the words, ** Judge not, that ye be not 
judged." 

Again we know not fully what men*s temp- 
tations are. 

Outward circumstances which we may 
know are but a part, and that often the 
smallest of a strong temptation. Inward bias 
is far more important. A man's appetites, 
passions, tastes, ambitions, constitutional ten- 
dencies are the chief elements in the case. 
These are the powder; outward circum- 
stances are only the spark which alone would 
be harmless. Hence things which to some 
are no temptations are to others differently 
constituted well-nigh irresistible. 

A grog-shop is no snare to a man whose 

224 



Perils of the Censorious Temper 

habits have always been strict; but to the 
reformed inebriate whose past intemperance 
has fastened upon him a morbid craving for 
drink, the sight of one is like fire to tinder. 

A youth with no taste for music and 
little for society, feels it but small self-denial 
to avoid the ball-room. Another with oppo- 
site tastes is absolutely fascinated with its 
excitements. 

Some men are naturally benevolent. It 
is no hardship for them to give. They cannot 
help giving, when a touching appeal is made ; 
but others have a hard fight with a penurious 
disposition whenever they undertake to be 
benevolent. 

Men are born with different natures. 
Their souls have different instruments with 
which to work and vastly different hin- 
drances to overcome. Some natures are well 
balanced, healthy, easily accessible to spirit- 
ual influences. Such men have little trouble, 
comparatively speaking, to be pure, upright, 
religious; and the more shame to them if 
they are not. But other natures are gross, 
one-sided, distorted, prone to evil; every- 
thing good has to be drilled into them by the 
sheer force of hard self-discipline. Hence the 
utter impossibility of judging by what we 
see, since there is so much that we do not 
see and cannot adequately know. 

225 



The Reason of Suffering 

Look out upon one of our harbors on any 
clear day; a dozen ships dot the horizon. 
The sails are in view but not the hulls ; and 
watching the sails we see what progress each 
is making; but who from this can judge of 
the fidelity of those crews? Some of those 
ships are light, trim, built for speed and 
easily worked. Others are clumsy, slow 
sailers; and others still are nothing but 
scows; with hardest labor only moderate 
speed can be made. 

Men are like those crews and their natures 
are the vessels. Some have light, swift- 
moving crafts, easily managed; some have 
slow and clumsy barques; and others make 
the voyage of life in mere scows, and every 
inch of progress is by diligent toil and hard 
rowing. The different rates of progress are 
in some sense matters of observation; but 
who can sound the depths of every nature 
so as to say just how much thought, care, 
patience, self-denial, faithful endeavor, the 
actual progress has cost? In any case of 
faultiness, who can tell how much has still 
been resisted? 

I once knew a man censured for having 
a violent temper; many remarked it; he 
was much talked of in the neighborhood. On 
gaining his confidence he told me the secret. 
It was constitutional. From his youth he 

226 



Perils of the Censorious Temper 

had been subject to sudden fits of anger so 
extreme as almost to constitute insanity. No 
one regretted it more than himself ; but spite 
of his efforts it would sometimes break out. 
In all probability that man was already 
doing more in the way of resisting passion 
than his critics who had no such infirmity, 
but did their sinning in some other less visible 
form. ' 

The apostle Thomas is a somewhat similar 
example. He also had an infirmity. He was 
naturally despondent. Hence he found it 
impossible to believe that Christ had risen 
on the evidence that satisfied others. He 
must see for himself. *' Except I see in his 
hands the print of the nails," he exclaimed, 
" and put my fingers in the print of the nails, 
and thrust my hand into his side I will not 
believe." This was asking too much. This 
unbelief was a fault. But how did Jesus treat 
the unbeliever ? Harshly upbraid him ? Draw 
invidious comparisons between him and the 
other disciples? Sit in judgment upon him 
as no doubt many were ready then as now 
to do? Nothing of the kind. Jesus knew 
well that Thomas at heart was as true as any 
of the others, and he condescended to his 
disciple's need. When we recall the scene 
in that crowded room: Jesus suddenly ap- 
pearing in the midst, and, after the usual 

227 



The Reason of Suffering 

salutation, turning at once to Thomas as 
if his whole errand was to him and, without 
a word or tone of reproach, exclaiming: 
" Reach hither thy finger and behold my 
hands ; and reach hither thy hand and thrust 
it into my side; and be not faithless, but 
believing " ; we seem to hear an echo voicing 
the lesson of that wonderful example to all 
his disciples, and saying in tones louder than 
when his own lips uttered it upon the mount, 
" Judge not, that ye be not judged." 

But again we know not adequately the 
past history of others; the condition from 
which they have come to their present state. 

Suppose that an act, in a given case, 
fairly represents a man as he is now, still we 
are unprepared to pass judgment upon him 
until we know the point from which he set 
out. The question of merit is a question of 
progress. It is not simply what a man is 
but rather what has he become, how far has 
he got on from his starting-point, that fixes 
his place on any just scale. So God judges. 
The man with four talents receives the same 
unqualified approval as the man with ten. 
He has not so much. A superficial judge 
would rank him lower; but the fact is he 
had not so much at the start. His improve- 
ment of what he had is the matter of im- 
portance. In this he is equal to the others. 

228 



Perils of the Censorious Temper 

He has doubled his money. The other has 
done no more; and is therefore no more 
deserving, though he has more. 

Hence the judgments by which we at- 
tempt to classify our fellowmen are all liable 
to reversal. We cannot know exactly the 
depths out of which many of them have 
climbed and the formidable obstacles they 
have overcome. No eye but God's can take 
in all that, or adequately comprehend a single 
human experience. The lowest name on 
our list may stand highest on God's. " Many 
that are first shall be last," and many that 
are *' last shall be first " in the day when 
God makes up His verdict. And when we 
allow ourselves to judge those who seem to 
be beneath us we run the risk of presenting 
to God's eye the ungraceful spectacle of a 
man condemning his betters. 

Our judgment is irrelevant and should be 
suspended. We ought to " judge not " but 
forbear to judge. We cannot classify men 
with certainty; we know not whom to put 
together. Likeness of moral status by no 
means proves likeness of merit in God's 
view. What would you think of a man who 
judged of his neighbors' business capacity 
by the amount of cash they have in hand? 
Taking it for granted that everyone who has 
ten thousand dollars, for example, must be 

229 



The Reason of Suffering 

a man of thrift and ability and worthy of 
trust ? He would make some great mistakes ; 
for of two men having the same amount of 
money one may be capable and the other 
incapable. The latter began with this sum, 
or more; his friends set him up in business; 
he has made no progress, perhaps has run 
behind. His money represents no merit in 
himself. The other, on the contrary, began 
without a penny. From the depths of poverty 
he has struggled up to his present position 
by patient, skillful effort. His money repre- 
sents his own energy, skill, self-denial, toil, 
sacrifice, and on this account is the criterion 
of merit. 

So even the moral status of men does not 
always enable us to judge them. We know 
not how far it represents their own earnest, 
faithful effort, or how much real progress it 
indicates. It would be great injustice, for 
example, to judge the converted heathen by 
the moral standard of a New England church. 
The native converts, we are not surprised to 
be told, are often morally below the standard 
of our ordinary society ; but even this is a vast 
advance upon their state as pagans. How 
unjust to compare them with men born under 
the eaves of the sanctuary, and enjoying a 
Christian education in this favored land. 
But not more unjust than much of the de- 

230 



Perils of the Censorious Temper 

traction that is rife in this same highly 
favored land. 

Many a faithful spirit, striving against 
great disadvantages, is wounded and chilled 
by the harsh criticisms of those more fortu- 
nate, it may be, but not more deserving. 
How little we know of the real struggles, the 
hidden conflicts, the secret burdens of those 
even immediately about us ! How little others 
know of our own ! The golden rule, methinks, 
applies well here and echoes the words, 
** Judge not, that ye be not judged." 

Finally, we often know not with certainty 
the real causes of men's acts and peculiarities. 

Men often have secrets which they never 
divulge. They frequently act from motives 
which they take care to hide. They even 
suffer themselves to be misunderstood and 
wronged rather than reveal them. Many 
a man is called morose, sour, unsocial, who 
is simply unhappy. His life is a struggle with 
disease or grief of mind. Some hidden in- 
firmity, some secret sorrow, preys upon his 
spirit. He goes about heavily burdened, but 
concealing the burden, and because he stoops 
a little under its weight he is made a target 
for the arrows of sharp-tongued detraction. 
And not seldom a man is harshly censured for 
conduct which is really most praiseworthy. 

A young man was once observed to be 

231 



The Reason of Suffering 

''close *' with his money. He avoided places 
of amusement and refused to join his com- 
panions in those diversions which involved 
expense. They called him penurious, nig- 
gardly, mean-spirited, and made him the butt 
of ridicule. The simple fact was that he was 
saving his earnings for the comfort and 
support of an aged mother. Not one of his 
critics was chargeable with anything half so 
generous and noble. 

And further, men often exhibit singu- 
larities, not in themselves admirable, but 
which under the circumstances are marks of 
honor. They are the tokens of hard-won 
victories ; the scars remaining from successful 
conflicts with evil. Scars are not ornamental, 
but they may be honorable. Luther and 
Knox had not, it is said, much polish of 
manner; they were not men to shine in a 
parlor. And what was the reason? This: 
they were pioneers. They lived in stormy 
times; they were called to a hand-to-hand 
struggle with the powers of darkness, and they 
perilled their lives in the conflict. No wonder 
they acquired a manner somewhat rough and 
dictatorial. This in them was but the out- 
cropping of the very qualities by which they 
achieved victory. 

And then too, when a man is struggling 
with a perverted tendency in himself he is 

232 



Perils of the Censorious Temper 

often forced to deny even its legitimate 
scope. He not only straightens up ; he leans 
a little the other way. He braces himself for 
greater safety. On level ground one may 
stand upright; but on a side hill he must 
lean or fall. So when one undertakes to 
climb the hill of reform he naturally braces 
himself. If he has been self-indulgent he will 
become austere. If he has been a spendthrift 
he will become ''close.'' If he has been fond 
of show he will become overplain. The 
"long face" with which Christians are some- 
times reproached may be but the natural 
and proper reaction from the thoughtless 
levity which was once their bane. In the 
circumstances these things are marks of 
honor. They are proofs of conflict and 
tokens of victory. 

But how utterly impossible is it that these 
circumstances should always be known to us. 
Those who allow themselves to criticise the 
peculiarities of others are always in danger of 
condemning those whom God approves. 

Thus our ignorance of conditions renders 
us incapable of judging others. Acts in 
themselves considered we may judge; but 
to judge the persons by the acts we are not 
fully able. We cannot be certain of even one 
of the many elements that enter into the 
problem. 

233 



The Reason of Suffering 

We cannot know, whether or how far a 
given act truly represents a man at the time 
it is done. 

We cannot know what a man's tempta- 
tions are, what are the influences at work 
upon him from without, and what are the 
difficulties arising from his own nature, or 
how far, notwithstanding his present short- 
comings, he is actually restraining his wrong 
tendencies. 

We cannot know the past history and 
condition of others, the point from which 
they started, and the actual progress they 
have already made. 

We cannot know, finally, how far many 
things wont to be criticised are the result of 
motives and causes which either excuse or 
even transform them into marks of honor. 

No eye but God's can take in all these 
items ; no mind but His can search the depths 
of every heart, trace every act to its real 
source, weigh with precision each of the ten 
thousand influences from without and from 
within constantly at work in every experience, 
and justly determine the actual merit or 
demerit of human conduct. 

God is judge alone. It is ours to walk 
in humility and to suspend judgment. A 
proper sense of the limitations of our knowl- 
edge will enable us to feel the force of the 

234 



Perils of the Censorious Temper 

words of the apostle James: " Speak not 
evil one of another, brethren. He that speak- 
eth evil of his brother, and judgeth his 
brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth 
the law ; but if thou judge the law, thou art 
not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is 
one lawgiver and one judge, who is able to 
save and to destroy; who art thou that 
judgest another? " 



235 



XIV 
PERSONAL INFLUENCE 

There are certain philosophers who hold 
a curious and interesting theory of our rela- 
tion to one another. They tell us that every 
man is surrounded by an invisible medium 
which, like an atmosphere, emanates from 
himself, and partakes of the essence of his 
own personality. They believe that this 
envelope, encompassing him as the air does 
the earth, extends to a considerable distance, 
touching and mingling with that of other 
men, and becoming a means of silent but con- 
stant and effective communication with them. 
Thus, on the side of feeling and impression, 
each man is constantly transmitting some- 
thing of his own quality to the persons and 
lives of others. 

All this may be and doubtless is a fancy; 
but the fact which lies under it, and which it 
seeks to explain, is vividly real. Men's lives 
do intermingle. Personality is a power. The 
person of every man is a fountain of effective 
influence, good or bad, or a mixture of the 
two, ever welling forth and unconsciously 
affecting other life-currents. 

236 



Personal Influence 

This truth in its simplest form no one 
would care to dispute. The evidence is before 
the eyes of all in that broad, open fact that 
families, neighborhoods and nations, each 
and all, have a character of their own, trans- 
mitted with undeviating certainty from gen- 
eration to generation, each man as he is born 
receiving, so to speak, the distinctive stamp 
of the society that is around him. Just as 
little will anyone deny that this fact of per- 
sonal influence has the highest practical 
interest, or that there is hardly, if at all, 
another which plays a larger part in the great 
drama (too often tragedy) of human ex- 
perience. To get a due impression of it we 
need to pass in review the multiplied ways 
by and through which we are influentially 
connected with others. 

Look first at the impulse to imitate 
others ; a natural impulse, strong always but 
specially so in the earliest and most formative 
periods of life. 

The child mimics everything. It is thus 
that he learns. The words, tones, motions, 
the acts and the manners of his elders, he 
notes and cons as a lesson, and that with 
greater diligence and far greater success than 
he will probably ever do from a book. At 
no period will his education advance more 
rapidly, but the text-books he is studying are 

237 



The Reason of Suffering 

his parents and older friends. Their ways 
become his ways, and their thoughts his 
thoughts, because they are the only models 
he has before him, and after some model his 
nature compels him to copy. 

The molten metal must, as it cools, take 
some form, and it will take the shape of the 
surface on which it falls ; it will be formed in 
imitation of something. The unformed, plas- 
tic nature of childhood must be shaped in a 
large measure upon the models of other lives 
around. The impulse of imitation is but the 
incarnated necessity of imitation which is 
upon him as a doom of weal or of woe. And 
thus we of today are silently but powerfully 
affecting and moulding the generation that 
will soon fill our place. 

Here as well as anywhere, perhaps, may 
come in the fact that mothers rule the world. 
They are the models following which the 
strong spirits of earth work out its destiny. 
The facts are familiar. Caesar, for example, 
the Gracchi, Napoleon, Sir Walter Scott, 
Lord Bacon, Patrick Henry, George Wash- 
ington, John Wesley, Philip Doddridge, are 
all known to have manifested the traits 
and to have carried out the principles of 
noble mothers. Doubtless there were other 
points of connection besides the law before us ; 
but this alone would be enough. Early 

238 



Personal Influence 

copyings fix the style. The boy who talks 
Billingsgate in his youth never gets rid of 
the brogue, though his organs of speech may 
be altogether faultless. 

This law of imitation is by no means con- 
fined to childhood. On the contrary it con- 
tinues in force and works with great power, 
though not so exclusively, to the end of life. 
By the mere force of it we are likely without 
thought to copy what others are doing, and 
they are quite sure to return the compliment. 
A man can as little walk abroad toward the 
sun and not be followed by his shadow as he 
can move amid the ranks of society and not 
have imitators. And thus this law furnishes 
an open channel through which our lives are 
constantly pouring streams of effective in- 
fluence into those of others. 

A second fact to be noted is what may 
be called the law of credence or trust. 

We naturally take it for granted that what 
other men do we may ; that this is the proper 
and right thing to be done; and thus the 
moral sentiment is shaped and directed. 
This principle like the preceding is specially 
applicable to children. They naturally trust 
their elders. They believe all that is told 
them. To them the tales of the nursery are 
indubitable verities. Jack, the Giant Killer, 
is as real to them as the town beadle. The 

239 



The Reason of Suffering 

bears that ate up the children's bread and 
milk are not a whit more mythical than the 
house-dog or the kitten. Their credulity is 
boundless. It would require more than a 
Baron Munchausen to invent a tale at which 
they would pause. Older people are oracles 
to them, and thus pour a stream of moral 
influence into the very center of their being. 

This impulse to fasten our trust on 
others abides with us in no small force to the 
end of life. We are all influenced in our 
moral judgments and views of things by the 
opinions of others far more than we are 
aware. Should we carefully analyze our 
opinions it would surprise us to find how 
many of them have been merely caught up 
from society around us. It is not more sure 
that a man must breathe the air of a room 
while in it, and breathing it must find it 
affected by the breathing of every other man 
there, than it is that he will constantly im- 
bibe more or less of the views, opinions and 
sentiments that make up the moral atmos- 
phere of the circle in which he moves. Here 
again we find an open channel through which 
our lives are continually flowing into each 
other. 

A third fact equally significant is our 
love of approbation. 

We naturally desire to stand well with 

240 



Personal Influence 

others, to have their approval, to be agree- 
able to them, and therefore, to be in agree- 
ment with them. And so a strong pressure 
is upon us to fall in with the ways and cus- 
toms of other men around us. We dislike to 
be odd, to be looked at and pointed at as one 
who is peculiar, over-scrupulous, and per- 
haps bigoted. 

Hence the tyranny of fashion which few 
can resist. Not a few would as soon be 
marched to the county jail as forced to appear 
in public with last year's bonnet or a coat 
out of style. With what electric swiftness 
will a new fashion, in dress or in amusements, 
pervade a community. A bald spot on the 
head of a French court lady, which she sought 
to conceal with a heavy headdress, once set 
all Europe to wearing tiaras. And we have 
not yet forgotten how quickly, a few years 
ago, the whole nation rushed into spelling 
matches and in a few months as quickly aban- 
doned them. And as a sensible writer re- 
marks: '* We have fashions, too, in literature 
and in worship and in moral and religious 
doctrine almost equally powerful. How many 
will violate the best rules of society because 
it is the practice of their circle. How many 
reject Christ because of friends or acquaint- 
ances who have no suspicion of the influence 
they exert, and will not have till the last 

241 



The Reason of Suffering 

day shows them what they have done. Every 
good man has thus a power in his person 
more mighty than his words and arguments 
and which others feel when he Httle suspects 
it. Every bad man, too, has a fund of poison 
in his character which is tainting those around 
him when it is not in his thoughts to do them 
an injury. He is read and understood. 
His sensual tastes and habits, his unbelieving 
spirit, his suppressed leer at religion, have all 
a power, and take hold of the hearts of others 
whether he will have it so or not." These 
words are true and here in this power of 
fashion, founded on our natural approbative- 
ness, we find a third channel through which 
all that is in us is constantly pouring itself 
into the lives of others. 

Again there is the still broader fact of 
social unity. 

We are not mere individuals; we are not 
in every sense independent; we are inter- 
dependent ; we are all parts of a larger whole 
as truly as the different parts of a tree. In a 
sense we are units. But society is also a 
unity; and the latter unit includes the 
former units. 

Society is therefore a complex unit. It 
is a body of which individuals are members. 
While each member is governed by a law of 
its own in its particular field of action, the 

242 



Personal Influence 

whole body is governed by a similar law 
which it is impossible for a member wholly 
to escape. There is as it were a common life 
alongside of the individual life. Our natures 
have an open side on which they are joined 
and through which the life currents constantly 
circulate. 

This is a fact full of significance. This 
junction of our natures on one side of them 
furnishes a channel along which each life is 
continually pouring strong tides of influence 
into the lives of others. The social body of 
which we are members. The term itself 
carries with it the implication of constant and 
powerful interaction. Is the body torpid? 
The vigorous action of one member will 
quicken the pulse in every other member. 
Is a member diseased? The tainted blood 
will carry the bad infection from point to 
point through the whole system. How diffi- 
cult even with conscientious effort it is to 
resist the tyranny of this law we all feel. 
It is specially apparent in the obstacles that 
hinder any attempted moral reform. Slavery 
in the South domineered over all Southerners. 
Spite of its enormity, spite of the natural 
impulse of the conscience and of the human 
instincts, fewer and fewer voices were raised 
against it in its own field, till at last peaceful 
reform became impossible and it had to be 

243 



The Reason of Suffering 

dashed down by an earthquake of revolution 
and blood. 

The temperance reform, we are told, 
meets no obstacle so formidable as the social 
glass. The drinking custom, where it exists, 
rules the individual. Few have the will or 
the desire even to resist. The bad law of 
the body, of the mass, rules the separate 
members, and thousands of persons whose 
intentions are good, and whose general charac- 
ter seems to be upright, are drawn into the 
current and sucked down by the maelstrom. 

Yet this law of the mass is simply a force 
created by the contribution of individuals. 
There are hundreds of such laws or tenden- 
cies, good or bad, to which every life is con- 
tributing, and thus sending a strong impulse, 
upward or downward, to elevate or to degrade, 
into many other lives. 

To get a full impression of this and the 
previously mentioned facts — for they are 
all connected — we must look a little deeper 
and consider more specifically the great law 
of sympathy. 

Feeling begets feeling. Any expression 
of a sentiment tends to propagate it. Angry 
words stir up anger even in a bystander. A 
petulant, ill-natured harangue ruffles the tem- 
per of all hearers, even the most disinterested. 
Courage and enthusiasm are proverbially con- 

244 



Personal Influence 

tagious. Pathos never fails to melt. Honest 
tears multiply themselves. A touch of humor 
is irresistible ; and has often availed to trans- 
form a mob of hooting opponents into an 
audience of good-natured listeners. Our na- 
tures seem to be laid with trains of combus- 
tibles, ever renewed, ready to take fire on 
the slightest occasion and blaze through wide 
circles. 

It is thus that a single man, by a timely 
effort, will often communicate his own spirit 
to a multitude and change the fate of a nation. 
Washington at Monmouth had but to wave 
his plumed hat, and spur his steed toward 
the foe, and the retreating Americans regained 
their courage and turned about on the instant. 
Arnold at Sempach cried out, ** Make way 
for liberty! '' and hurled himself upon the 
Austrian spears, and at once the whole Swiss 
army caught the spirit of high self-devotion 
and rushed into the unequal fray. Paul, on 
the wrecked ship, had but to say, ** Be of good 
cheer," and calmly begin to eat bread, and 
the whole ship's company recovered from their 
despair and followed his example. Peter the 
Hermit, filled with a wild, fanatic zeal for the 
recovery of Jerusalem from the hands of the 
Saracens, went about making rude harangues, 
and Europe, rising from end to end, like 
Ezekiel's army from the valley of dry bones 

245 



The Reason of Suffering 

under the breath of God, precipitated itself 
like an inundation in successive tides of 
battle and blood upon the fields of Asia. 

Such facts as these throw a startling 
light on our ordinary experience. They 
merely display on a broad scale what is con- 
stantly going on around us upon a narrower 
one. We are constantly sending electric 
flashes of sentiment and impulse across these 
wires of sympathy. It requires no special 
effort. A word, a tone, even a look is suffi- 
cient to give the impression and secure the 
result. It is not only when we are seeking to 
do so, but always, in the ordinary course 
and unfolding of daily experience, we are 
sending pulsating thrills of impulse and voli- 
tion into the bosoms of our companions. 

Such then are some of the chief of the 
many channels of influence through which 
every life is pouring its tides outward into 
those of others. The law of imitation, of 
natural trust, of love of approbation, of social 
unity, and of intimate, ever-ready sympathy : 
these five elements, with others, go to make 
up a force or law under which we live and 
must live; a law pregnant with the fate of 
souls, and exercising an unmeasured sway 
over the destiny of each one of us. 

The first practical thought that naturally 
occurs to us from the view we have taken is 

246 



Personal Influence 

the urgent need of great care in our inter- 
course with others. 

A word may seem a small thing, but it 
may make an impression that shall be lasting 
as eternity. A single kind word has lifted 
the gloom from many a soul and saved it, as 
it did Gough, from something worse than 
temporal death. And a broken heart is not 
seldom the work of some hasty expression 
of the opposite kind. 

A tone, or a look is a seeming trifle, but it 
may degrade or uplift, stain or ennoble that 
which is immortal. A cheering, kindly smile 
has been known to win a whole family to 
embrace the Savior whose grace had put it 
upon the Christian's face. And it was but 
a look that reclaimed the erring Peter from 
his sad defection. 

A teardrop weighs but the fraction of a 
grain, but what may it not do? It fell at 
Bonaparte's feet from a suppliant maid, and 
that strong soul, that had moved unbent 
amid the carnage of a hundred fights, melted 
into pity, and a condemned father lived. It 
drops on the cheek of an abandoned sot from 
the face of his sorrowing daughter, and the 
demon of drunkenness is cast out, and the 
lost reclaimed. It gushed from the eyes of 
Jesus at Lazarus' tomb, and a new ray of 
heavenly light and comfort broke upon the 

247 



The Reason op Suffering 

world in which millions will rejoice to the 
end of time. A gibe, an untimely jest, a 
word of trifling, may seem a light matter, but 
it may injure a soul : — as in the case of the 
young lady whose deep impressions were 
wholly dissipated by a light remark of a 
church-member as they passed together from 
the sanctuary. 

Someone has written that '* among the 
high Alps at certain seasons the traveller 
is told to proceed very quietly for on the 
steep slopes overhead the snow hangs so 
evenly balanced that the sound of a voice, 
or the report of a gun, may destroy the 
equilibrium, and bring down the avalanche 
on its path of ruin." And so about our way 
there may be a soul in the very crisis of its 
moral history, trembling between life and 
death, and a mere touch or shadow may 
determine its destiny. What care, what self- 
restraint, then, are needed in our acts and 
words! Because we have certain views and 
feelings it does not follow that we should 
express them; they may do injury; we are 
bound to have a due regard to results; it 
may be our duty to repress them. Because 
my pistol happens to be loaded it does not 
follow that I should discharge it at the first 
object I meet. Should that object be a liiad 
dog, it might be well to fire ; but if it be an 

248 



Personal Influence 

innocent child then to do so were a fearful 
crime. Many of our opinions and sentiments 
are not much other than loaded firearms sure 
in their expressions to do great execution, 
and regard must be had to probable results. 

The earth is a sanctuary. God is here. 
His work of saving grace is going on around. 
A word may help, or a word may mar. He 
is saying to us as to one of old: **Put off 
thy shoes from off thy feet for the place 
whereon thou standest is holy ground.'* He 
who is careless of his influence, is like one 
venturing to enter the ancient temple with 
defiled sandals upon his feet; a profanation 
then thought worthy of death. 

If a stream which furnished the water 
supply to a neighbor's family ran past my 
house, I should feel obliged in conscience not 
only not to foul the water with refuse and 
garbage, but to use diligent care to prevent 
such a result. Streams of moral influence are 
constantly flowing out from every life of 
which others are to partake. Duty to God 
and love to man combine to urge upon us the 
most scrupulous care as to the quality of 
that influence. 

Our responsibility for character is the 
second thought that presses. 

Character is a power of the chiefest rank. 
It is constantly revealed even in the com- 

249 



The Reason of Suffering 

monest things of life, and just as constantly 
it is breathing out its quality upon society 
and reproducing its own image. A man 
need not try to exert an influence in order 
to do so. He must do so whether he will or 
not. Simply in and by being what he is, 
does he wield a power upon others com- 
pared with which all he can do by direct, 
conscious effort is but trivial. A fire heats a 
room simply because it is a fire and is in the 
room. A mass of ice would chill it in the 
same manner. Every life, good or bad, 
simply by what it is in itself, constantly acts 
upon the social body, and can no more be 
prevented from doing so than a stove full of 
burning coals can be kept from radiating 
heat, or an iceberg from dispensing cold. 

When the prepared plate of the photog- 
rapher is uncovered, an image of the object 
before it is instantly outlined; such is the 
quality and power of the all-surrounding 
light. Every soul about us is a prepared 
plate, and we are continually transferring to 
it some features of our moral visage by the 
force and efficacy of a universal law. No 
man can mingle with his fellows without 
leaving his mark, any more than he can walk 
over new-fallen snow and leave no tracks. 
No man can escape responsibility. No one 
not actively engaged in the service of God 

250 



Personal Influence 

can flatter himself that at least he is doing 
no harm. He cannot, being such, avoid it. 
The whole weight of his personality is felt, 
and that on the side on which he himself is 
found. It may well be that he is insen- 
sibly drawing his children, his companions, 
his dearest friends, hopelessly away from 
heaven. Many times by a look or glance he 
not unlikely turns the scale of someone's 
immortality. 

On the other hand, the true servant of 
God may be well assured that he lives not 
in vain. Be it much or little that he can do 
by purposed effort there is still the savor of 
a consecrated life which is ever much and 
never little. What we do is much ; but what 
we are is much more. The sun does not light 
his attendant worlds by travelling around to 
visit them, but by shining steadily in his own 
place. And the apostle seems to have thought 
of this when he wrote, " Do all things without 
murmurings and disputings that ye may be 
blameless and harmless, the sons of God 
without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked 
and perverse nation among whom ye shine 
as lights in the world"; or strictly rendered, 
'* as do the luminaries in the natural creation.'* 

No doubt many surprises await us at the 
judgment. One may be to show many that 
their lives, having been lived uprightly, did 

251 



The Reason op Suffering 

far more than they thought for the world's 
benefit. Paul was wise in refusing to judge 
even himself, but deferring all, as he said, 
** Till the Lord come, who both will bring 
to light the hidden things of darkness and 
will make manifest the counsels of the 
hearts; and then shall every man have his 
praise " (exactly that which belongs to him, 
and no other) ** from God.'* 



252 



XV 

REVIVALS 

GoD*s purpose and plan of working con- 
stitute the guide and warrant of all true 
prayer. Whatever be the necessities that 
drive God's creatures to the throne of His 
grace, their hope of favor and help can rest 
on no other sure foundation than some known 
and settled principle of the divine adminis- 
tration. Whether the wants to be supplied 
are physical or spiritual, whether the ex- 
igencies to be met have reference to our 
temporal or eternal interests, there can be 
no intelligent, believing prayer save as the 
petitions offered are seen to fall within the 
scope of one or more of the divine purposes. 
For any man, or body of men, to pray for 
that which lies wholly outside of these pur- 
poses is as vain and hopeless as to sow the 
seas or plough the sands of the desert. To 
do it knowingly would be the most culpable 
irreverence. To do it ignorantly is to incur 
the penalty of all error, failure, defeat and 
utter disappointment. To pray that the 
dead may be raised to life would be utterly 
hopeless, for the simple reason that God 

253 



The Reason of Suffering 

does not purpose at present to bring such 
events to pass. But to pray that the sick 
may recover health through God's blessing 
on the means employed is rational and hope- 
ful, because it is still within the divine pur- 
poses that such events should take place. 

Hence the degree of confidence with 
which any petition may be urged in the 
audience of heaven will depend upon the 
relation existing between the subject matter 
of that petition and the purposes of God. 
This relation may be made known either by 
the working of natural law, by the course of 
Providence, or by the declaration and prom- 
ises of the inspired word. But however re- 
vealed it is and must be the ground and 
measure of all intelligent expectation. If 
the event desired be opposed to, or outside 
of the divine purposes, there can be no 
rational confidence and all prayer is barred. 
If it be an event lying so near the dividing 
line as to leave it doubtful to our appre- 
hension, whether it be in fact without or 
within it, hope, though not excluded, must be 
dim and confidence wavering. But if it be 
such an event as lies far within the border 
and directly in the line of God's ordinary 
and constant working, then there may and 
shotild be the highest degree of confidence 
and even assurance of hope. 

254 



Revivals 

On this solid ground it wotild seem the 
psalmist was struggling to plant his feet when 
he offered his well-known prayer for a re- 
vival, saying, ** Wilt Thou not revive us 
again? What hinders that we should hope 
and expect this blessing at Thy hands? 
Is it not such a bounty as falls within the 
scope of Thy purposes and the line of Thine 
accustomed working? Were not former in- 
stances intended as a ground of faith that 
such an event is in accordance with Thy 
settled principle and plan of operation? As 
in other and former circumstances so now, 
* wilt Thou not revive us again, that Thy 
people may rejoice in Thee? * " 

The question here suggested is whether 
it be in accordance with God's purpose that 
the work of regenerating the race should be 
carried on, not so much by a steady, equable, 
unvarying movement, as by a series of sud- 
den and rapid advances separated by periods 
of comparative quiet during which the agen- 
cies and forces necessary to produce the 
onward movement are being prepared. This 
is a question of vital and perennial interest. 
For whether or not the interrogatory form of 
the psalmist's prayer indicates that there 
was any doubt in his mind on this point, 
certain it is that such a doubt often finds a 
lurking-place in the hearts of many, hindering 

255 



The Reason of Suffering 

their prayers, and crippling their efforts to 
secure those rapid advances of Christ's king- 
dom commonly called " revivals." If then it 
can be shown that this serial, wave-like move- 
ment is, more than any other, in accordance 
with the methods and processes of the divine 
working, this doubt will be removed or pre- 
vented and a sure foundation will be laid for 
that one indispensable condition of all suc- 
cess, believing effort, work based upon and 
inspired by faith. 

What then is the method of the divine 
working in the various spheres of matter and 
mind to which our observation extends? Do 
we anywhere see results accomplished by a 
steady, equable, uninterrupted progress from 
first to last, or do we everywhere see them 
brought about by successive stages of ad- 
vancement, by a series of onward move- 
ments, rapid and fruitful while they last, but 
separated by intervals of quiet preparation? 

Question the natural philosopher: he 
will tell you that the springs gather them- 
selves slowly in the bosom of the hills, but 
break forth suddenly from their sides. He 
will tell you that the volcanic forces, generated 
beneath the earth's crust, accumulate their 
energies gradually but do their work rapidly, 
shattering a mountain, sinking a continent or 
drying a sea in a single day. He will tell you 

256 



Revivals 

that the vast process of evaporation, whose 
final work it is to supply the ground with 
moisture, goes on quietly from the surface of 
oceans, lakes and streams, treasuring up 
slowly, through successive days, its vapors 
in the clouds. But when the crisis comes 
and the clouds dissolve in showers, the 
whole treasury of the skies is poured forth at 
once and the earth is watered in an hour. 

Question the chemist: he will tell you 
that the electric fluid gathers itself silently 
and in darkness till it charges the cloud, but 
that a sudden flash illumines the whole heaven 
when it springs to do its work, and the rock 
crumbles or the temple falls in the twinkling 
of an eye. He will tell you that the water in 
the boiler of an engine must receive gradually 
one degree of heat after another through 
more than a hundred and fifty degrees, 
before any steam available for work is pro- 
duced. But when the turning point is reached 
a single additional degree gives play to the 
accumulated force of all, the whole mass 
turns at once to elastic vapor, and the train 
whirls rapidly to its destination. He will 
tell you, on the other hand, that the cold in- 
creases slowly in intensity as winter ap- 
proaches through weeks and even months, 
and yet there is no actual congelation; the 
streams flow on as freely as ever. At length, 

257 



The Reason of Suffering 

when the limit is reached, a few hours of 
darkness do the work so long preparing, a 
mobile fluid changes rapidly to a solid, the 
lakes are frozen, the streams are congealed 
and a continent is icebound in a single night. 
Interrogate the botanist: he will testify 
that the oak is produced from the acorn, 
not by a constant, unvarying progress, but 
by a series of successive advances; a few 
weeks in summer sufficing to accomplish all 
the actual increase in bulk for which the 
whole preceding year has prepared the way. 
He will tell you that the like is true of all 
vegetable growth; that it proceeds by suc- 
cessive stages, by yearly revivals. That after 
the winds of autumn have swept the leaves 
from the trees there is no growth, but only 
preparation for growth, through all the vast 
domain of the vegetable kingdom during the 
wintry months ; but when the sun has climbed 
again into the upper heavens and the vital 
forces have received the requisite increment 
of energy from his q-uickening beams, then 
a half score of days will transform the whole 
face of nature. A single half month will do 
the work prepared in the preceding five or 
six, clothing the earth with acres of verdure 
and loading the forests with tons of foliage; 
and all animated beings will be seen rejoicing 
in God's great yearly revival of His work. 

258 



Revivals 

Call now the geologist to the stand, and 
his testimony will form a fitting climax to 
those already adduced. He will tell you 
that the stupendous process of development 
by which the earth was evolved from ele- 
mental matter and brought to its present 
condition exhibits, not a steady, equable 
progress, but a series of spasmodic advances. 
He will testify that immense periods elapsed 
before there were any signs of vegetation in 
the earth ; but when the work of preparation 
was completed, swiftly and at once, as if by 
a new act of creation, the barren earth became 
a verdant field, and one great step was taken. 
That after this epoch there came another 
preparatory period of incalculable length 
during which there were no animals; but 
when this weary period was fulfilled, there 
was another sudden, rapid advance, the 
earth and seas teemed with living creatures 
and the second step was taken: that in the 
same way was the transition accomplished 
from order to order in the animal kingdom; 
from radiates to mollusks, from mollusks to 
articulates, from articulates to vertebrates; 
from fishes to reptiles, to birds, to mammals 
and finally to man, the capstone of the dome 
— each and every step being a sharp and 
rapid movement in advance after a long 
interval of quiet preparation. 

259 



The Reason of Suffering 

Thus everywhere in the world of matter 
we find one and the same method in opera- 
tion ; that of successive, rapid movements not 
equable, unvarying advancement. Forces 
prepared and gathered slowly come suddenly 
to the issue and expend their energies ; there 
is a rapid movement in advance; the in- 
tended result is quickly accomplished; and 
then follows another interval of comparative 
quiet. There is absolutely no process of 
nature that does not conform to this method. 
Those processes which at first view seem to 
be exceptions are all found on closer inspec- 
tion to be only fragments of some vaster 
process which is no exception. Thus the 
law of sudden and successive advances is 
everywhere dominant over that of equable, 
unvarying progress. In every department of 
the material universe God carries on His 
work by successive movements, by a series of 
revivals. 

Quitting now the realm of matter we turn 
to examine God's method of operation in 
His providential government of our race as a 
whole. And with the great light of the vast 
array of natural analogies just surveyed il- 
lumining the field of observation our search 
need not be long. The law will be found 
wholly in harmony with those analogies. 
The progress which the race has made in its 

260 



Revivals 

onward march toward a higher condition, 
toward civilization, to use a technical term, 
has been in every department by a series of 
leaps, of spasmodic movements, of sudden 
and rapid advances, interspersed by a long 
period of apparent stagnation, but really of 
preparation. And here the examples crowd 
upon our view in such numbers, that it will 
be possible to mention only the most 
striking. 

Take first the matter of civil and politi- 
cal liberty. That on the whole the race has 
made great progress in this matter is evident 
to all. But how has it been made? Not at 
all by a continuous and equable movement, 
but by a series of sudden and rapid advances. 
For more than a thousand years before the 
strains of Homer broke the silence of ages, 
liberty languished. It had hardly a form or 
a name. But at length, on the fair soil of 
Greece, the forces so long preparing burst into 
open, visible activity, the banner of freedom 
was quickly carried to an advanced position, 
and one great movement was completed. 

Then came a period of reverses. Greece 
fell. Liberty seemed to decline ; but she was 
only mustering her forces for another ad- 
vance. Under the blue skies of Italy she 
again unfurled her flag, the sturdy, law- 
abiding Romans bore it far to the front, 

261 



The Reason of Suffering 

and another great movement was quickly 
achieved. 

The interval of preparation that pre- 
ceded the next great advance was long and 
dark. For more than fifteen hundred years 
there was apparently stagnation and even 
decline. But when the set time had come 
the rocky shores of England echoed to the 
shouts of freemen rallying to the standard. 
Magna Charta was won, and constitutional 
liberty was quickly established on a sure 
foundation. 

If it be thought more satisfactory to look 
at the course of single nations, history will 
testify that no people ever attained the bless- 
ings of liberty and good government by an 
even, unvarying progress; but that wher- 
ever this result has been secured it has been 
always by a series of revolutions, a succes- 
sion of sudden and rapid movements, sepa- 
rated by intervals of comparative stagnation. 
No better example need be sought than the 
history of our own nation. A hundred and 
fifty years were required to prepare the way 
for national independence. But at length 
the causes prepared silently burst into open, 
visible activity on the plains of Lexington, 
and seven years only of fierce and rapid 
movement finished the work. Thirty years 
more rolled away before the nation was ready 

262 



Revivals 

to assert her freedom on the seas. Then two 
years of determined activity, of fierce con- 
flict, made her a peer in the family of nations, 
and the second great step was taken. 

Then follows nearly a half century of 
apparent stagnation during which the inter- 
nal elements of slavery and misrule fumed 
and seethed like volcanic fires, threatening 
to burst forth and overwhelm the land with 
their destroying lava. But when the crisis 
came the nation sprang up at once to vigor- 
ous action, and four glorious years of vic- 
torious warfare, freedom's great revival, ex- 
tirpated the curse and wiped the last stain 
from our flag. 

What is true of political progress is true 
of every line of progress. In literature, 
science, art, and philosophy, in all their 
branches, history tells of no unvarying, 
steady progress, but of sharp and rapid move- 
ments, separated by long intervals of com- 
parative stagnation and often apparent retro- 
gression. It tells of a succession of memorable 
crises, of grand epochs ; such as the invention 
of printing, of the steam engine, of the power 
loom, the mariner's compass, the new method 
of Bacon, the great discovery of Newton; 
sudden, quick advances doing in a few short 
years the work of centuries. 

Thus in God's providential government of 

263 



The Reason of Suffering 

the race His method and plan of operation 
is wholly the same as in His government of 
the material universe. In the former as in 
the latter He accomplishes the results intended 
not by an unvarying and continuous, but 
by a serial, wave-like movement. In both 
these great departments of His kingdom He 
carries on His work by a succession of sudden 
and rapid advances, in short by a series of 
revivals. 

Coming now finally to that last and 
highest sphere of God's working known to 
us, the establishment of His spiritual king- 
dom on earth, it would be indeed a great sur- 
prise did we find here a method wholly 
different from that so uniformly observed in 
every other department. No such surprise 
awaits us. God is one and His plan is one. 
A sublime and wonderful harmony exists 
between all the departments of His universal 
kingdom. The same great law, the same 
method and plan of working appears in the 
highest department as in every other. From 
the calling of Abraham down to the present 
hour the work of redemption has gone for- 
ward, not by a steady and unvarying prog- 
ress, but by a succession of separate and 
rapid advances, in a word by a series of 
revivals. 

Glance over the history of the church 

264 



Revivals 

and survey the grand outlines of the plan 
as thus far fulfilled. What constitutes the 
first period of that history? Two hundred 
years of wretched bondage; and then swift 
as the bursting of the gathered storm, the 
judgments on Egypt, the wonders of the 
sea, the glories of Sinai, and in a year that 
herd of slaves is a nation organized, inde- 
pendent, powerful. The first great move- 
ment was accomplished and it was a revival. 

What constitutes the second period ? Forty 
years of wretched and fruitless wandering 
in the desert ; and then the sound of Joshua's 
trumpet, and the aroused nation pours like 
a torrent into the promised land. The second 
great movement was accomplished, and it 
was a revival. What constitutes the third 
period? Four hundred years of comparative 
stagnation, and then the conquering sword 
of David, the prosperous reign of Solomon, 
the splendors of the temple, and the cul- 
mination of the national glory. The third 
great movement was accomplished, and it 
was a revival. 

It would delay us too long, nor is it 
necessary to describe at length succeeding 
movements. They were all of the same 
character, sudden, rapid, fruitful advances 
after intervals of declension; they were all 
revivals. The reformation under Hezekiah, 

265 



The Reason of Suffering 

the return from Babylon, the triumph of the 
Maccabean Kings, what were they but re- 
vivals? The day of Pentecost was a revival. 
The conversion of Constantine and downfall 
of paganism was a revival. The great Refor- 
mation was a great revival. The overthrow 
of popery in England was a revival. The 
vast movement organized by Wesley was a 
revival. The great awakening in the days of 
Jonathan Edwards was a great revival. 

The progress of divine truth through 
the ages is Hke the rising of the ocean tide. 
A mighty wave comes rolling upon the beach. 
It breaks, it subsides, it recedes. But soon 
another mightier still rolls over the scattered 
foam and tosses its spray a half rod farther 
upon the shelving sands. Another follows 
and yet another in tireless chase, each one 
outstripping the former, and gaining upon 
the shore, until at length the beetling cliffs 
are overtopped and the ocean pours in upon 
the land. Thus has the tide of truth advanced 
through past ages, and thus shall it roll its 
mighty surges down into the future until 
the knowledge and glory of the Lord shall 
cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. 

And the law which is seen to characterize 
the work in its grander outlines extends also 
to those of lesser prominence. If we look 
at a single period, or part of a period, it will 

266 



Revivals 

appear to be made up of a series of minor 
fluctuations. It will exhibit a succession of 
lesser movements, but each and all marked 
by the same comparative suddenness and 
rapidity. This will hold good whether we 
look at the church as a whole, or at a sin- 
gle nation, or at a single local, independent 
church. In each and every case the work 
goes on by a succession of separate and rapid 
movements, by a series of revivals. 

The grand conclusion then to which the 
facts compel us is that in every department 
of His kingdom, through all worlds both of 
matter and spirit God has one unvarying 
method and plan of working. Everywhere 
He carries forward His work and executes His 
plans, not by a steady, even, unfluctuating 
advance, but by a series of sudden and rapid 
advances after a long interval of quiet prepa- 
ration. In a word, that everywhere and 
always, and conspicuously in the work of 
redemption. He pushes onward to their con- 
summation His great designs by a con- 
tinual series of successive revivals. 

The practical bearing of this truth is of the 
utmost importance. It points out in no doubt- 
ful manner the proper object and direction of 
Christian effort. It is prominently and even 
comprehensively to promote and secure re- 
vivals. They should be worked for, prayed 

267 



The Reason of Suffering 

for, hoped for, expected. Nothing that can 
be done to promote them should be left 
undone. Every agency of the church should 
be called into requisition, every force utilized, 
every talent enlisted, every means employed, 
in order to secure them. When enjoyed no 
pains should be spared to make them last- 
ing and fruitful. This is the one great general 
object to be kept always in view, never to 
be overlooked, never to be forgotten, never 
to be set aside or exchanged for any other. 
Christian working and praying ought always 
to be shaped with a wise reference to this 
end. 

They cannot legitimately take any con- 
trary direction, for in no other can they fall 
so directly into the line of God's predetermined 
purpose and plan of working. In this direc- 
tion lies assured success; in any other lies 
ultimate and substantial failure. To cease 
laboring for revivals and begin laboring for 
some other manner of progress, whether under 
the influence of prejudice or mistake, is to 
run directly counter to the divine purposes 
and incur unavoidable defeat. To hope and 
pray for success by any other general method 
than that of revivals is as vain and fruitless 
as to pray that the showers may cease to 
descend, or that the planets may begin to 
revolve in circles instead of ellipses. Re- 

268 



Revivals 

vivals ! Who shall venture to depreciate, hin- 
der, or in any way oppose them? They are 
God's great forward movements in bringing 
in his kingdom. Revivals! Who shall say 
aught against them, or who whether Christian 
or worldling shall dare even to stand aloof from 
and ignore them? They are God's great 
harvest seasons wherein are garnered the 
stores of immortality. 

'' Wilt thou not revive us again? " The 
lingering doubt here hinted at has in truth 
no shadow of foundation. To pray for a 
revival is not to pray for something outside 
the scope of the divine purposes but alto- 
gether within it. No prayer can be framed 
that has a surer basis or greater encourage- 
ment. No prayer can be offered with more 
intelligent faith or firmer assurance. Will not 
God revive His work again ? The answer is now 
and always ; He will do it ; it is His purpose 
and nothing can stay it. There has been 
no declension or stagnation in the past 
which has not at length issued in a new 
advance, a fresh revival. There will be 
none in the future which God will not in 
due time turn into a new and mightier for- 
ward movement, until the last great move- 
ment, the last revival, shall sweep away the 
strongholds of sin, and crown the Savior 
sovereign of the world. 

269 



The Reason of Suffering 

A time of declension is doubtless a time for 
self-examination, for confession, for humilia- 
tion and earnest prayer, but by no means 
a time for doubt or depression. We cannot 
always tarry upon the mountain tops; we 
must walk through the valleys. But when 
in the valley, the mountains are still in view ; 
we shall climb them again. We cannot always 
ride upon the crest of the wave; we must 
go down betimes into the hollows. But 
when in the caverns of the sea, then, even 
then, de profundis, out of the depths, may 
we look up and pray, with intense longing, 
but steady faith: '* Wilt thou not revive us 
again, that thy people may rejoice in thee." 



3T0 



XVI 
OPPORTUNITY 

That God deals with us by the method 
of opportunity is a fact that merits the 
profoundest consideration. Students of the 
Scriptures are well aware how constantly the 
inspired writers keep this fact in the fore- 
ground. In doing this they correctly inter- 
pret the teaching of nature and the voice of 
experience, for in whatever direction we 
look we see that blessings offered must be 
seized upon and accepted promptly or they 
will be missed. 

If we ask how God through nature offers 
to one seeking those temporal blessings which 
are necessary to our physical comfort and 
life, we are met at once by the oft observed 
fact that His offers are not continuous but 
periodic. There are times when those bless- 
ings may be secured; there are other and 
longer times when they cannot be secured. 
There are seasons and opportunities when 
they are brought near; we have but to seek 
and they are ours. But those seasons once 
past, the opportunity neglected, no amount 
of attempted seeking is of any avail. 

271 



The Reason of Suffering 

It is vain for the husbandman to sow 
wheat in midsummer or plant corn in autumn. 
No amount of toil will secure him a crop if 
he misses the appointed season. If he 
neglects that season no future diligence will 
save him from the penalty. God will not 
delay because he delays. God gives him the 
season, offers the opportunity, but does not 
prolong it. He must seize it promptly and 
improve it diligently, for once past it cannot 
be regained. He must sow in the time of 
sowing, and plant in the time of planting, or 
his garners will be empty and he must starve. 

With equal promptitude must he seize 
God's offer of a harvest. When the tree 
bends with fruit and the grape is purple on 
the vine, then let him haste for the oppor- 
tunity will not last. Now an abundance for 
the year's wants is freely offered, and prompt 
action will secure it. But the offer will be 
soon withdrawn; a few days, and the fruit 
ungathered will decay and disappear and no 
diligence then will be of any avail. Naked 
boughs and withered tendrils are all that will 
reward the most painful search through the 
dreary months of winter. 

Everywhere in nature the same law and 
method of special opportunity reigns supreme. 
Spring violets cannot be gathered in sum- 
mer. The roses of June lie withered in July. 

272 



Opportunity 

All nature's beautiful and valued products 
are within our reach, not at all periods, but 
only at certain limited periods. In His own 
time God makes the offer, but quickly with- 
draws it. Prompt action will secure the 
blessing, delayed action will never secure 
it. The whole year with its grand circle of 
changing opportunities is continually repeat- 
ing in symbolic language, the familiar in- 
junction of the Hebrew prophet, " Seek ye 
the Lord while He may be found; call ye 
upon Him while He is near." 

Take now a step in advance. Turning 
the eye from that sphere of action in which 
man comes into direct contact with external 
nature, fix it on that in which he comes into 
more immediate relation to society. In the 
vast sphere of social action in which he ap- 
pears as a competitor for what is called suc- 
cess in life we again inquire what is God's 
method of dealing? How does He here put 
advantages within our reach? In what way 
does God by the working of social laws make 
offers of success? Are those offers continu- 
ous? Is the road to wealth, power or fame 
always open? Can a man at any moment 
he may choose set out hopefully in their 
pursuit? Nothing could be more unlike the 
truth than such a supposition. The fact, in 
actual experience, is directly the reverse of 

273 



The Reason of Suffering 

this. It is a matter of the commonest ob- 
servation that there are in life certain sea- 
sons only when success is within reach. 
There are critical junctures, special oppor- 
tunities, when prompt, decisive action will 
accomplish what no amount of toil will effect 
when those opportunities are once let slip. 

Many a young man by a brief period of 
faithful industry has won the confidence of 
his employers and travelled thenceforth an 
easy road to wealth. Many another, by a 
little negligence at the beginning of his 
career, has damaged his credit and seen the 
pathway to fortune barred against him for- 
ever. 

It is not merely the amount of exertion a 
man may make, it is far more the prompti- 
tude with which he seizes and makes use of 
those opportunities which God opens before 
him that makes his life a success or a failure. 
Had Bonaparte quailed at the bridge of Lodi 
he would never have swayed the scepter 
of France. Had McClellan used promptly 
his great opportunity at the battle of Fair 
Oaks, and given the word to advance when 
his oflficers informed him of the enemy's 
flight, Richmond would have fallen and his 
name stood first among his country's de- 
fenders. 

But it is needless to multiply examples 

274 



Opportunity 

where every life is an example. There are 
in the life of every man critical moments, 
turning points, which decide the future. God 
opens before him the door of success but will 
not stand holding it. If it be not soon 
entered He closes it again, and that finally. 
He makes an offer of good, but if it be not 
promptly accepted He again withdraws it 
and never repeats it. The record of the loss, 
failure and calamity of which the world is so 
full is more than anything else a record of 
lost opportunities, of God's gracious offers 
neglected until withdrawn. 

God's method of dealing in this sphere 
is the same as in the former. Here as there 
we find in force the law of special oppor- 
tunity, of gracious seasons, when prompt, 
decisive action will secure the blessing, but 
hesitation and delay will forfeit it forever. 
And precisely this is the meaning of those 
immortal lines of Shakespeare, the keenest 
of all observers and the most competent 
witness that could be summoned: 

"There is a tide in the affairs of men. 
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune ; 
Omitted, all the voyage of their life 
Is bound in shallows and in miseries." 

Take now another step in advance and 
looking away from the outward life fix the 
view upon the inner life, in its intellectual 

275 



The Reason op Suffering 

and moral aspects. Here again, in the laws 
of our own being, God's method is plainly 
seen to be that of gracious seasons, of special 
opportunities. Take the three following as 
prominent illustrations. 

First: It is plain that a certain measure 
of acquired knowledge, of mental training 
and discipline is necessary to our welfare. 
How does God provide for its attainment? 
By that law of our constitution which lays 
upon the parent the pleasing task of pro- 
viding for the outward wants of the child 
during the period of youth, the latter is fur- 
nished with the needed opportunity. Now 
he has leisure, now he has the means at his 
command, to secure the blessing. God makes 
the offer. He gives the season, but it must be 
promptly seized. It is fair and sufficient, no 
doubt, but still too brief to admit of dila- 
toriness; and it will not be repeated. The 
days of youth fly swiftly. Then comes the 
tumult of life. Anxious cares and stern toils 
absorb the energies of manhood, and the 
gracious season, improved or unimproved, 
is gone forever. 

But even were this not the case, were it 
even possible that the outward season and 
opportunity might be repeated, there re- 
mains a second and still more significant fact 
which would render it in a great degree 

276 



Opportunity 

abortive. By the law of its development 
the mind left untrained soon begins to lose 
its tractability. It becomes set and hardened 
in its undeveloped state. It no longer re- 
ceives impressions readily. It refuses to yield 
to disciplme. It cannot now be moulded 
and trained as it once could. The plastic 
season has passed and will not return. When 
the worker in stucco has prepared his ma- 
terial he must hasten to shape it ; for soon it 
begins to harden and his opportunity ceases. 
The mind has its plastic season; a season 
when it may be shaped and moulded, to right 
tastes and habits, intellectual and moral. 
But that season once lost, wrong habits and 
tastes once fixed and indurated, and a man 
of his own strength can no more reverse 
them and repair the injury than the Ethio- 
pian can change his skin, or the leopard his 
spots. 

The third illustration brings us into a 
still higher sphere of observation. It is a 
well known fact that there are often times 
in the earlier experiences of men when 
energies hitherto dormant seem to wake up 
within them — times when they become 
suddenly conscious of qualities and powers 
before undreamed of, and feel stirring within 
them an impulse to high achievement. 

When such a revelation is vouchsafed 

277 



Thb Reason op Suffering 

to a man, when it opens before his soul in- 
spiring views of future possibility, and sounds 
in his ears the call to lofty endeavor, then 
let him not hesitate; it is his great oppor- 
tunity ; it is God 's call to a higher and nobler 
life. If it be promptly obeyed the vision 
brightens, the day-star climbs higher; till 
at length the noontide of fame sheds its 
immortal radiance upon a human life. But 
if it be not promptly obeyed, if there is 
hesitation and dallying and delay, the vision 
fades, the horizon quickly narrows, and 
the fog and dust of common life settle down 
hopelessly upon the spirit. 

Seizing such opportunities, obeying such 
calls, men have become eminent in every 
sphere of effort. Warriors, statesmen, phi- 
losophers, painters, sculptors, bards, have 
wrought immortal deeds, spoken words that 
cannot die, and sung to distant climes and 
peoples across the ages. How many have 
heard the call, wavered and sunk to oblivion 
cannot be told, but it is the story of multi- 
tudes. Many a man has lived ignobly and 
died obscurely who might have shone in 
the arena of art, science or letters, had he 
not wavered and delayed while God was 
saying, ** Come up higher.'* Many an un- 
known grave is green over ** hearts once 
pregnant with celestial fire,'* over ** hands 

278 



Opportunity 

which the rod of empire might have swayed, 
or waked to ecstacy the living lyre," had 
they not weakly missed God's appointed 
season, failed to seek the offered blessing 
while it could be found. 

Finally, in the light of these analogies, what 
weight and urgency attaches to those ex- 
amples of God's unvarying method of deal- 
ing with us which the Scriptures record. 
Without exception they show us that God's 
offers of grace, if refused, are quickly with- 
drawn; that when God calls haste must 
be made. 

How was it with those who perished at 
the deluge? A brief period for repentance 
and then, the doom. For a few years, barely 
an eighth part of what was then an ordinary 
life-time, God, by the mouth of Noah, held 
out the offer of grace ; and then the windows 
of heaven were opened, the floods descended 
and a world was swept at once to irreversible 
destruction. 

How was it with Esau? A few years he 
was on trial and was found wanting; and 
then, a life-time of outcast wandering and 
vain regret. Once rejected and stripped of 
his birthright he found no place of repent- 
ance though he sought it carefully with 
tears. Then too late he called on God, but 
He would not hear. 

279 



The Reason of Suffering 

How was it with the Israelites who came 
out of Egypt with Moses? A brief season of 
grace; a fair offer, to their faith, of the 
promised land: And then, the terrible doom 
on their unbelief, " I have sworn in My 
wrath, ye shall not enter into My rest " ; and 
after forty years of wandering an entire 
generation perished in the desert. 

How was it with the Pharisees in Christ's 
day? There was the preaching of John and 
the ministry of Jesus, a fair but brief season 
of mercy. And then the dread sentence 
from the lips of their rejected Lord, ** I go 
my way; and ye shall die in your sins, and 
whither I go ye cannot come." 

How was it with the bidden guests in 
the parable of the supper? A single gracious 
invitation, met on their part by hesitation 
and vain excuses, and then the word of the 
incensed master, ** Go out quickly into the 
streets and lanes of the city, and bring in 
hither the poor, and the maimed, and the 
halt, and the blind. . . , For I say unto 
you, that none of those men which were 
bidden shall taste of my supper.*' 

And if, amid the multitude of instances, 
there be one more solemnly impressive than 
all others, it is when we behold the Son of 
God standing upon the Mount of Olives, 
and bending his sorrowful eyes upon the 

280 



Opportunity 

doomed city of his fathers, whose day of 
grace had been sinned away, and uttering 
through tears of more than mortal anguish 
the broken exclamation, ** Oh, that thou 
hadst known, even thou, at least, in this thy 
day the things which belong unto thy peace; 
but now they are hid from thine eyes." 

Verily God's offer of grace demands prompt 
attention. It is full, free, sufficient; but 
it will not last. Soon it will be withdrawn, 
and the opportunity will close. Prompt, de- 
cisive, immediate action is the only pathway 
of hope. All God's dealings with us; all the 
processes of nature, the ways of providence, 
the laws of our own being, and all the ex- 
amples of recorded time, take up and repeat 
with solemn urgency the admonition of the 
prophet, ** Seek ye the Lord while He may 
be found; call ye upon Him while He is 
near," 



281 



XVII 
THE GOOD HOPE 

All men hope, and thus know in general 
what hope is. But the hope set before us 
in the gospel, the Christian hope, is so greatly 
superior to every other that it can be fully 
understood only by those who possess it. 
This superiority relates both to object and 
nature, both to the things hoped for, and to the 
certainty of the expectation. The Christian's 
hope is " the hope of glory." Its object is 
heaven, immortal life, the perfection of all 
our varied powers; their growth and ex- 
pansion in the presence of God and in the 
society of angels, and an exultant joy m 
their use which will find expression in songs 
of praise forever. 

Such a hope may well swallow up every 
other and make its possessor comparatively 
indifferent both to the joys and sorrows of 
time; and this all the more reasonably when 
we look further to its nature. It is a " good 
hope "; an assured prospect; an expectation 
which is perfectly certain to be fulfilled. All 
others are more or less doubtful. The pros- 
pect is at best clouded by mists of uncer- 

282 



The Good Hope 

tainty. Expectation is hesitating ; and some- 
times fades out into a mere desire, which 
properly speaking is not hope at all. But it 
is the prominent feature of the Christian 
hope that expectation equals desire, and both 
elements (for these are the two elements of 
hope) blend in an assurance which cannot 
be shaken. Our *' hope," Paul tells us, 
** maketh not ashamed "; " which hope we 
have as an anchor of the soul both sure and 
steadfast, and which entereth into that within 
the veil." 

This assurance has a good foundation, 
namely, the indwelling of Christ ; the actual, 
personal, and known presence of the Lord of 
life in the inner sanctuary of the heart. 
This indwelling is often asserted in Scrip- 
ture and there are several points of view 
from which we may look at it and discover 
the root and foundation of hope. One is that 
the Divine Power is working within. 

The new heart is God's gift; and all the 
experiences of the new heart are fruits of 
union with Christ. He is the sole source and 
foundation of holiness and spiritual life. 
Apart from him they can no more exist than 
the crude iron can exert magnetic power 
when separated from the magnet or the 
branch put forth flowers and fruit when torn 
from the parent stem. All hearty love for 

283 



The Reason of Suffering 

the truth ; all successful striving against evil ; 
all real aspiration after holiness and con- 
formity to Christ ; all delight in worship and 
the contemplation of God; all comfort in 
prayer and delight in praise; all true peni- 
tence and sorrow for sin; all inward joy, 
peace, light and conscious nearness to God of 
which the Christian can testify, are his work 
wrought within us; for we are, says Paul, 
** his workmanship, created anew unto good 
works." 

Thus his presence within us is manifest. 
Where the work is going forward there the 
workman must be. Yonder stream flowing 
continually proves to me its connection with 
the reservoir. Yonder edifice rising steadily 
from its foundations from day to day tells 
me that the builder cannot be absent. The 
work of renewal which the true believer finds 
going on within him proves that the Divine 
Renewer is present there. None but Himself 
could be the author of such a work. 

Homer in his Odyssey tells us that when 
Penelope, the chaste queen of Ithaca, sus- 
pected the presence of Ulysses, her long absent 
husband, in disguise among the crowd of her 
importunate suitors, she tested the matter 
by giving them the bow which her lord de- 
parting had left in her keeping, declaring 
that she would show favor only to him who 

284 



The Good Hope 

could wield it. In vain did one after another 
make the attempt. It was too strong for 
their feeble limbs. It was made for the arms 
of a hero. They could not bend it. The 
ponderous arrow slipped from their weak 
fingers and fell useless to the ground. Till 
at length one of lordlier mien and mightier 
arm stepped forward, seized the bow, lifted 
it to his eye, drew the arrow to its head and 
sent it hurtling to the mark. Instantly 
Penelope rushed into his presence and the 
faithful queen was in the arms of her long- 
absent but never forgotten lord. The strat> 
agem had succeeded. The workman was 
known by his work. Only Ulysses could 
bend Ulysses' bow; and only the indwelling 
Lord of life and grace can take away the love 
of the world and draw the heart in its pur- 
poses and aspirations upward to heaven and 
things divine. 

Now God is an architect that never deserts 
His work. What He begins He finishes, and 
brings to glory at last everyone whom He 
calls and renews. Here is a sure foundation 
of hope. The Christian conscious of a new 
experience cannot but hope. The work 
already accomplished and going on within 
him is a preparation for glory. It is a foun- 
dation which demands heaven's perfectness 
as its superstructure, and would be imperfect 

285 



The Reason op Suffering 

without it. It is the growing of the tree 
whose fruit must be eternal joy. 

No true Christian can be altogether hope- 
less. He may despond but hope lives still. 
Clouds may obscure his sky but they cannot 
annihilate the light of the risen sun. It is 
day and not night after all, and the difference 
is immense and not to be wholly overlooked. 

Some excellent Christians have a way of 
looking at the dark side and form the habit 
of speaking despondently of themselves. But 
the fact is they really have a great deal more 
hope than they express, or perhaps than 
they allow themselves generally to feel. It 
is related of one such that he went to the 
extreme of declaring that he had given up all 
hope whatever and fully expected to be 
lost. A brother desirous of helping him, 
after trying various expedients, finally offered 
him a dollar if he would definitely and ex- 
pressly relinquish all chance of attaining 
heaven. He appeared astonished and shocked 
at the proposal. " But why so? " urged 
the brother. ** If, as you say, there is no 
hope at all for you then your chance is of 
course worth nothing at all, and a dollar is 
something." He reflected for a moment and 
then exclaimed: ** Sell my chance of heaven 
for a dollar? No, not for a thousand worlds 
like this will I make such a surrender! " 

286 



The Good Hope 

He had suddenly discovered that he had a 
strong, invincible hope after all. 

God deals with realities and not with 
fancies; salvation is a present fact as well 
as a future prospect. If you are growing 
more humble, more conscious of sin, more 
entirely reliant upon God's grace, in a word, 
if self is waning and Christ is waxing before 
the inner eye, you cannot help having hope, 
and you had better acknowledge it. Per- 
haps your self-distrust has prevented you 
from confessing Christ and taking your place 
among his people. This is unwise and un- 
grateful. Trust him and your hope will 
burst into a brightness that will fill your soul 
with strength and joy. " Blessed are they 
that hunger and thirst after righteousness for 
they shall be filled." Yes, blessed are they, 
because in this gracious hungering and thirst- 
ing they see God s begun work and therein 
the proof of His purpose to finish it. '* If 
we be dead with Christ we believe that we 
shall also live with him," says Paul. ** We 
know,'* says John, ** that we have passed 
from death unto life because we love the 
brethren." The change within of which the 
believer is conscious is a ground of assurance 
because it is a proof and manifestation of 
"Christ in him, the* hope of glory/' 

♦Col. 1:27. 

287 



The Reason of Suffering 

Another point of view is obtained when we 
reflect that Christ's image is being formed 
within. 

This fact is asserted in Scripture. Writ- 
ing to the Corinthians Paul says: " But we 
all with open face, beholding as in a glass the 
glory of the Lord, are changed into the same 
image from glory to glory, even as by the 
Spirit of the Lord." Place an object before 
the camera of the photographer in which is 
the prepared plate, but shut out the light, 
and no image is formed; but the moment 
the sun's rays are admitted and fall reflected 
from the object upon the plate the form and 
outline of the object are transferred to the 
plate and the image is formed. An intel- 
lectual knowledge of Christ is only a pre- 
paratory step; but when the light of the 
Spirit shines into the soul and we see Christ 
with the spiritual eye, then is it that with 
open (or unveiled) face we behold as in a mir- 
ror the glory of the Lord, and are " changed 
into the same image, from glory to glory, as 
by the Spirit of the Lord." 

Nor is this image a shadow, a mere im- 
pression made upon the surface. It is a 
spiritual image. It belongs to the soul's sub- 
stance. It is that which is born of the Spirit. 
It is the new man ; the new creature formed 
within by the mighty power of God. Hence 

288 



The Good Hope 

the bold and emphatic language of Paul to 
the Galatians when he exclaims in the 
earnestness of his affectionate anxiety for 
their spiritual safety, " My little children of 
whom I travail in birth again till Christ " 
(Christ himself as it were) " be formed within 
you." He himself is the best example of 
his own meaning. In the first chapter of 
the same epistle, he speaks of the time when 
it ** pleased God to reveal His Son " within 
him. To the Philippians he says: " God is 
my witness how greatly I long after you all, 
in the bowels " (or heart) *' of Jesus Christ.*' 
So mighty and divine was his love for the 
Philippians, so fully did Christ possess his 
soul, so bright was his image therein, that 
it seemed to him that the very heart of Christ 
was somehow beating in his own bosom. His 
will was the will of Christ. He had the same 
purposes, aims, desires, aspirations, affec- 
tions, attractions, repulsions, longings, yearn- 
ings, as those that filled the mind of his Lord. 
His moral and spiritual character was a 
bright reflection and copy of that of his 
Master ; so that Christ was represented and in 
a sense manifested to the world through him. 
So it is in greater or less measure with all 
disciples. Christ is formed within them. His 
imprint and likeness are there. There is in 
them as it were an embryo Christ; such a 

289 



The Reason of Suffering 

character in its principles, quality and ten- 
dency, as will produce (as it is developed) 
such a being, and such a life as was mani- 
fest in the humanity of Christ. Faint and 
rudimental may be this likeness at its begin- 
ning. Yet in every believer it is there and is 
sure to grow brighter. When the plate is 
first taken from the camera of the photog- 
rapher the picture is very imperfect to the 
eye, a mere outline. Yet it is there, and all 
there in rudiment, that will ever be there. 
The sun has done its work; but the artist 
has now to do his, in developing and bringing 
out the effects already wrought. By a skill- 
ful application of appropriate agents and 
instruments, the acid and the polishing brush, 
he will bring out and perfect the work of the 
sun, till the picture in every line and feature 
is an accurate and beautiful copy of the 
original. Regeneration forms the image of 
Christ; sanctification brings it out and 
makes it manifest; and the latter process is 
sure to follow the former. 

But how can the consciousness of such 
an inward fact fail to beget hope? It is a 
solid and immutable ground of hope. Does 
God love His only begotten Son ? Then must 
He also love the image and likeness of that 
Son wherever He beholds it. Those who 
bear it He also calls sons. He adopts them as 

290 



The Good Hope 

sons, and makes them because of their like- 
ness to Christ joint heirs with him to the 
kingdom of light. He who is like Christ 
must share Christ's glory. '* Beloved," says 
John, ** now are we the sons of God. And it 
doth not yet appear what we shall be, but 
we know that when he shall appear, we shall 
be like him for we shall see him as he is." 
And thus the brightening image of Christ in 
the believer is " Christ in him the hope of 
glory." 

There remains the fact of personal com- 
munion with God, a most interesting and sig- 
nificant fact. 

It was given to Moses to talk with God 
as a man talks with his friends; and this 
is mentioned as a most wonderful circum- 
stance and a special mark of favor. And in 
sober earnest it is a marvellous thing that a 
man should have personal fellowship and 
intercourse with God. When Jesus was as- 
suring his disciples of the fact it is nothing 
strange that they could not at first receive it 
and that one of them gave utterance to his 
wondering doubts. Jesus said, " He that 
hath my commandments and keepeth them, 
he it is that loveth me; and he that loveth 
me shall be loved of my Father, and I will 
love him, and will manifest myself to him." 
** And Judas saith unto him (not Iscariot), 

291 



The Reason of Suffering 

Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thy- 
self unto us and not unto the world? 

"Jesus answered and said unto him, If a 
man love me he will keep my word and my 
Father will love him, and we will come unto 
him, and make our abode with him." This 
promise has always been found sure. Paul 
spoke from experience when he said, *' Ye 
are the temple of the living God ; as God 
hath said, 1 will dwell in them and walk in 
them/' John too exclaims in an outburst 
of exultant joy, ** And truly our fellowship 
is with the Father and His son Jesus Christ." 
And Watts sings for the whole church, 

** The opening heavens around me shine, 
With beams of sacred bliss, 
While Jesus shows his heart is mine, 
And whispers, I am his." 

This fact of personal communion through 
the spirit with our ascended Lord is a mystery 
to the intellect. Scripture and experience 
assert it as a fact, but it cannot be fully set 
forth and explained in logical propositions. 
Some light, however, is thrown upon it by 
observing that personal communion has its 
root in personal sympathy. It is in essence 
a vivid consciousness of spiritual likeness, 
of having the same aims and desires, the 
same hopes and fears, the same affections and 
interests with another. It is this sympathy 

292 



The Good Hope 

which brings another near to us. We speak 
of a near friend and a distant acquaintance, 
accordingly as this sympathy is more or less 
intimate and that without regard to bodily 
presence. Bodily presence, though a help, 
is not essential even between man and man. 
An intimate sympathy is the main thing. A 
letter from a dear friend telling the story of 
his remembrance and love will bring him 
nearer to your thought and feeling than the 
stranger at your very side, though that friend 
may be hundreds of miles away. You know 
that the feelings of your heart are echoed in 
his, and in spirit you seem to have fellow- 
ship. Thus the Christian knows that the 
love that fills his heart is but an echo of that 
in the heart of Christ. There is spiritual 
contact. It is as if his heart were somehow 
in connection with the heart of Christ and 
conscious of its beating. 

When the tides roll in from the sea, every 
bay, creek and inlet is covered with ripples. 
They are in fellowship with the sea. There is 
immediate contact, and every wavelet upon 
their surface is but an echo of some mighty 
billow heaved from the ocean's depth. So 
every throb of holy love and joy thrilling the 
heart of the spirit-born soul is but an effect 
and an echo of the mighty billows rolling in 
from the ocean of God's infinite love. Christ 

293 



The Reason op Suffering 

in heaven is still with us. His heart enfolds 
us. His love bathes our spirits as the sea 
bathes the shore; and flows in through the 
channels of faith and aspiration as the tides 
flow into the rivers; and notwithstanding 
the absence of sight we feel that love and 
realizing his presence by a heart vision we 
** rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of 
glory," 

There is as intimate and subtle sympathy 
in the spiritual universe as in the natural, 
and in the latter it is well-nigh perfect. A 
few years ago the magnetic needle on the 
observatory at Berlin became wonderfully 
tremulous. What was the cause? It was 
not in the earth. It was not in the air. 
It was not in the cloudy regions of 
the terrestrial firmament. Nowhere in the 
earthly sphere could the most watchful ob- 
servers discover the cause; but when the 
astronomers turned their glasses upon the 
sun the secret was disclosed. Its bright disc 
was covered with spots. Huge masses of 
cloud vapor were rolling up in his firma- 
ment and casting their shadows toward the 
earth; and lo! every changeful motion was 
accurately registered by those delicate points 
of magnetic iron ninety-three millions of miles 
away. Such is the relation between Christ 
and his people. He is the spiritual Sun ; and 

294 



The Good Hope 

they are the magnets that mysteriously 
receive from him the electric currents of 
sympathy and love. The omnipresent Spirit 
of grace is the Spirit of Christ, an omnipresent 
Jesus Christ, come spiritually to his people 
no more to depart, according to his word, 
*' I will not leave you comfortless " (orphaned), 
*' I will come to you. Yet a little while and 
the world seeth me no more ; but ye see me ; 
because I live ye shall live also." 

This personal fellowship and communion 
is the culminating element of Christ's in- 
dwelling. It is the hope of glory because it 
is in truth glory begun. Heaven will be 
heaven to the Christian because his Lord 
will be there; and already that heaven 
dawns in his soul because already he feels 
the Lord to be with him. These gleams of 
his spiritual presence here tell of glory to 
come as surely as fountains and rivers tell of 
the sea; as springing grass and returning 
birds prophesy of the summer; or as the 
red rays of the morning twilight foretoken 
the glory of the coming sun. 

Enoch stepped into heaven without dy- 
ing; but this last step was only the natural 
completion of all the steps that preceded, 
while he " walked with God " on earth. So 
close became his fellowship with his Re- 
deemer, so powerful the attraction that 

295 



The Reason of Suffering 

drew him to the skies, that at last it over- 
came even the weight of a mortal body, and 
he soared upward carrying the burden into 
the bosom of his God. Elijah went up to the 
skies with a chariot and horses of fire. But 
this was only an outward exhibition of the 
inward fire of zeal and holy devotion which 
glowed within. It is thus essentially with 
all believers. *' Ye are dead," saith the 
Word " and your life is hid with Christ in 
God. When Christ who is our life shall appear 
then shall we also appear with him in glory." 
The glory to come will be only an outward 
manifestation and completion of the glory 
already begun in the inner life. 

This is finely expressed by the familiar 
hymn: — 

*' Oh what a blessed hope is ours; while here on earth 
we stay, 

We more than taste the heavenly powers and ante- 
date the day. 

We feel the resurrection near, our life in Christ 
concealed; 

And with his glorious presence here our earthen 
vessels filled," 



296 



XVIII 
DEATH 

Death is an enemy. The Bible so names 
it; and men universally, without distinction 
of nation or belief, have felt it to be so. Its 
presence, in reality or in thought, naturally 
brings fear. Even the saints in ages before 
the advent shrank from it with dread. The 
region beyond was to their view still shrouded 
in mist, and their whole beings recoiled from 
the sudden shock which must thrust them 
resistlessly into the unknown. 

David, when in deadly peril, pleaded 
earnestly with God for deliverance, saying: 
" What profit is there in my blood when I go 
down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee? 
Shall it declare thy truth ? Hear, O Lord, and 
have mercy upon me. Lord, be thou my 
helper." 

The good King Hezekiah when told that 
his disease was mortal turned his face to the 
wall and said: ** Remember now, O Lord, 
I beseech thee, how I have walked before 
thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and 
have done that which is good in thy sight." 
And ** Hezekiah wept sore." 

297 



The Reason op Suffering 

The writer of the 102nd Psalm, smitten 
with wasting sickness, cried out: " O my 
God, take me not away in the midst of my 
days; thy years are throughout all genera- 
tions/' 

" * My God,' I said, * thy servant spare, 
Thy years are one eternal noon ; 
From age to age thou changest not — 
Why must thy children die so soon? ' " 

We need not wonder that an apostle has 
presented as the striking feature of Christ's 
work that he came to destroy him who hath 
the power of death, that is the devil, and to 
deliver those, who, through fear of death, 
were all their lifetime subject to bondage. 
Death is a formidable foe. We must con- 
quer him or he will conquer us ; and victory 
on either side must be permanent and the 
results eternal. 

It is no victory over death to take up the 
theory of the materialist that there is nothing 
beyond. This is rather to make an uncon- 
ditional and craven surrender. If death ends 
all then it is indeed an undisputed master. 
Under the dark shadow of such a theory 
manhood not only cowers but withers, and 
life is degraded to the bestial order. He 
who takes refuge from the fear of death under 
such a theory tears the crown from his own 
head, and unmans himself. He shows by the 

298 



Death 

act that he has already given up the battle 
and acknowledged that he is a worthless 
thing; and that all his seeming high capac- 
ities are only a chance and meaningless play 
of firefly flashes. The poet has spoken none 
too strongly when he says: 

" And he, shall he, 
Man, God's last work, who seemed so fair, 
Such splendid purpose in his eyes, 
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies. 
And built him fanes of fruitless prayer , 

*' Who loved, who suffered countless ills. 
Who battled for the true and just, 
Be blown about the desert dust, 
Or sealed within the iron hills? 

*' No more? A monster then, a dream, 
A discord. Dragons of the prime 
That tear each other in their slime, 
Were mellow music matched with him.*' 

He who indulges a theory so dishonoring 
to our common humanity, to escape the fear 
of death, is like a man who seeks to escape 
a pursuing enemy by plunging headlong in 
a miry pit and sinking beneath the steaming 
ooze. 

Besides, such a theory is opposed to some 
of the deepest and most ineradicable instincts 
of our nature; instincts which are quite 
likely to assert themselves at unexpected 

209 



The Reason of Suffering 

moments and overset the theory that has 
been forcibly thrust upon them. The refuge, 
wretched as it is, is unavailing after all. 
Reason protests : 

*• My own dim life should teach me this. 
That life shall live forevermore, 
Else earth were darkness at the core. 
And dust and ashes all that is. 

" What then were God to such as I? 
*Twere hardly worth the while to choose 
Of things all mortal, or to use 
A little patience ere I die. 

*' 'Twere best at once to sink to peace. 
Like bird the charming serpent draws. 
To drop head foremost in the jaws 
Of vacant darkness and to cease." 

Thomas Paine thought he had found a 
covert from the fear of death under this 
theory, but he was very much self-deceived. 
Having exemplified the real tendency of his 
principles by the extreme of drunken de- 
bauchery for several years, he found that 
when the enemy approached he was the king 
of terrors. *' Gentlemen," said the lady who 
attended him, to some visitors who sought 
to do him good: "I really wish you may 
succeed with Mr. Paine, for he is laboring 
under great distress of mind ever since he 

300 



Death 

was told by his physician that he cannot 
possibly live, and must die shortly. He is 
truly to be pitied. His cries when left alone 
are heart-rending. * O Lord, help me ! ' he 
will exclaim during his paroxysms of dis- 
tress : ' God help me ! Jesus Christ help 
me! * repeating these expressions in a tone 
of voice that alarms the house. Then shortly 
after: ' But there is no God! * And then 
again, ' Yet if there should be, what would 
become of me hereafter? * Thus he will con- 
tinue for some time, when, on a sudden, he 
will scream as if in terror and agony and call 
for me by name. On one occasion I inquired 
what he wanted, * Stay with me,' he replied, 
' for God's sake, for I cannot bear to be left 
alone.' I told him I could not always be in 
the room; 'Then,' said he, 'send even a 
child to stay with me, for it is hell to be 
alone. ' I never saw a more unhappy or more 
forsaken man. It seems he cannot recon- 
cile himself to die." 

He had not conquered death; death had 
conquered him. Neither by denying the 
prime fact of immortality, nor by proving that 
fact, can death be conquered. It is not on 
this field that the battle can be fought and 
won. 

Neither can victory be gained by ignoring 
the foe. 

301 



Thb Reason of Suffering 

Some enemies can be best overcome in 
this way (like envious detractors for instance) 
but death is not one of them. He is sharp- 
ening his dart. He is approaching with sure 
though stealthy steps. In due time he will 
make his presence felt, and no man will escape 
the conflict, or mcrease the probability of 
victory by living in thoughtless forgetfulness 
and without preparation. 

Yet the inspired writers, as well as our 
own eyes, inform us that there is a class who 
take this course. They put far away the evil 
day. They live in the present and for the 
present. They purpose and act as if there 
were no foe to be met. Or, as David ex- 
presses it. " Their inward thought is that 
their houses shall continue forever, and their 
dwelling places to all generations." They 
seem for the present really to have put away 
the fear of death; but they have not really 
done so. The terror of the dark hour is sure 
to come; and generally all the more over- 
whelmingly, because so long thrust out of 
mind. 

Vitellius, the Roman emperor, was one 
of these. He was noted for his reckless self- 
indulgence and disregard of the future. But 
when death approached he quailed ; and made 
himself intoxicated because he was unable 
to endure its terrors. To fear to look in the 

302 



Death 

face of a foe is certainly no sign of victory 
over him. 

A wealthy merchant fell ill. He had 
lived for this world ; but now the foe he had 
ignored appeared armed with terrors. " Am 
I very sick," he asked his physician. ** Shall 
I never recover? " 

" You are quite sick," was the reply, 
** and should prepare for the worst." 

** Cannot I live a week? " 

"No, you will probably continue but a 
Httle while." 

'* Say not so," said the terrified sufferer; 
** I will give you a hundred thousand dollars 
if you will prolong my life three days." 

" I could not do it, my dear sir," returned 
the doctor, "for three hours." Within an 
hour the man was gone. 

Dives, it would seem, succeeded in put- 
ting away all thought of the stern hour till 
it actually came upon him ; but when in hell 
he " lifted up his eyes, being in torment," 
he was ready to own that death had got the 
victory. This is a foe that is not conquered, 
but rather surrendered to by living in thought- 
lessness of his power. 

Again, it is no victory over death to hide 
from ourselves its sterner aspects. 

Many do this. They minify death, be- 
little its importance, try to think of it as a 

303 



The Reason of Suffering 

matter of far less consequence than the Bible 
puts upon it. They call it the debt of nature ; 
and profess to think that it is only a natural 
and even desirable transition from one stage 
of life to another not very different. 

I once met a person who argued that death 
was no curse, but rather a blessing, coming 
to put an end to the infirmities of age and the 
ills of a wornout organism. 

But what is death to the speechless in- 
fants, one-fifth of whom die in the dawn of 
life? What is it in youth, in early manhood, 
in the prime of life? The great majority die 
in some of these periods, only a few live on to 
old age. Certainly there is a palpable error 
in this way of thinking. 

What too of the manner and circum- 
stances of the appointed way of exchanging 
worlds? What of the wasting sickness, 
the mortal agony, the dying groan, the pall, 
the hearse, the charnel-house, corruption and 
the worm? What does such a summons 
bode of the future? 

If the king should summon a subject to 
his presence by sending the royal chariot with 
every circumstance of honor, it would be 
taken as an omen of a favorable reception. 
But if the summons came in the form of the 
jail wagon, with scourgings and chains, quite 
a different conclusion would be drawn. Some- 

304 



Death 

thing like the latter is plainly the method by 
which in death we are summoned away. 
Hence the instinctive shrinking which we are 
apt to feel when the summons comes. 

It is vain to seek to cover up the stern 
features of the great destroyer. This is not 
conquering our foe; it is merely insisting 
upon looking upon him with one eye wil- 
fully shut. It argues a most culpable blind- 
ness and self-deception; of which no truly 
sincere and noble soul will be guilty. Says 
the great Pascal, speaking of such easy- 
going carelessness: ''Where can men get 
these sentiments? And how can it happen 
that a rational man reasons in this way? It 
is not necessary to have a very elevated soul 
in order to comprehend that there is here 
no true and solid enjoyment; that all our 
pleasures are but vanity; that our ills are 
infinite; and that, in fine, death, which 
threatens us every instant, must (so far as 
man's reason goes) in a few years reduce us 
to the horrible necessity of eternal annihila- 
tion or misery. There is nothing more real, 
more terrible than this. We may put as 
brave a face on it as we will, this is the end 
that awaits the fairest worldly life." 

Pascal is right. The euphemists, who 
comfort themselves with soft names, are 
wrong ; death is a foe to nature. All its cir- 

305 



The Reason of Suffering 

cumstances are forbidding and ominous of 
the future. Every healthy instinct of child 
or man recoils from it, and proclaims it a 
curse. Nature can never give us victory over 
our great enemy. 

What then can do it? Nothing short of 
the renewing grace of God. 

What is death? It is not exchange of 
worlds. No evidence exists that God ever 
intended that this world should always be 
our home. The law of progress forbids such 
a supposition. It is written in our constitu- 
tion as plainly as in that of the acorn that we 
are made to reach our maturity in a higher 
state than the present. The spirit within has 
a life-capacity that ought to develop, and, 
in some way, disentangle itself from lower 
conditions by climbing up victoriously into 
higher. Death results from the failure of 
this life-power. And death is the consequent 
premature and violent exchange of worlds, 
in weakness and not in strength. We fall 
instead of rising. Sin, the cause of this weak- 
ness, this failure of the inward life, is the 
sting, the real substance and force of death; 
and the strength of sin is the law, the prin- 
ciple of moral gravitation, which involves 
that the life that has failed and fallen in this 
world, will, if left to itself, fail and fall in 
worlds to come. 

306 



Death 

Grace renews and restores the inward life, 
and sets it again on an upward grade, and 
with all its power counterworks death. It 
uproots the sin which is the cause of death. 
It remedies the inward weakness which makes 
us its captives. In a word, by its very nature, 
as a new imperishable life, it takes away the 
substance of death, and leaves us at most but 
a mere fragment and shadow. 

The power of an inward life at one with 
God ! Who can measure it ? It has been fully 
manifest only in the one perfect man. When 
his face shone like the sun upon the Mount 
of Transfiguration there was a proof of it. 
When he rose from the tomb and ascended 
into heaven there was another yet more 
glorious exhibition of the same. Both these 
stupendous phenomena showed the power of 
the inward life. 

Thus he conquered death ; and thus doubt- 
less Enoch who was translated, and Elijah 
who ascended in the chariot of fire, were 
permitted to conquer. The power of the new 
life within, nourished by prayer and com- 
munion with God, so increased as to enable 
them, by grace, to shake loose the last grasp 
of the foe and go into the other world in a 
way of visible triumph. 

Should any saint of today attain to a like 
degree of holiness and inward spiritual power, 

307 



The Reason of Suffering 

past doubt he would be permitted to share 
the same experience. Paul certainly longed 
for it. Perhaps he would have attained it 
had not God seen it best for His own glory 
that His faithful ambassador should seal his 
testimony with his blood. But none the less 
certainly was he victor over the foe by the 
power of the life within ; and so the humblest 
disciple who lies down in weakness of the 
flesh to die, is still victor over the foe, if he 
feels within him, bearing him up, the power 
of the new life. 

Who is victor over death? He who is 
victor over sin. He who overcomes the world, 
in his daily experience ; for he is thereby 
overcoming death. 

The battle is already set and the issue 
may be not doubtfully prognosticated from 
the complexion of the life as it glides on. 

** O, sir, how did she die? " asked a friend 
of Rev. John Newton, concerning a mutual 
acquaintance. 

'* There is a more important question," 
was the reply, "which you should have asked 
first." 

" What question can be more important? " 
urged the other. 

** How did she live," was the emphatic 
reply. 

The grace that enables us to live well 

308 



Death 

will help us to die well; there is no other 
power that can conquer the foe. 

" Live in Christ," said the dying Knox, 
*'live in Christ, and the flesh need not fear 
death." He felt himself victor by the power 
of the life within. 

Dr. Judson, who comforted his stricken 
friends as he approached the last hour, said, 
** Death will never take me by surprise, do 
not be afraid of that; I feel so strong in 
Christ." 

John Wesley's dying words were, *' The 
best of all is, God is with us." The divine 
life within, that had braced him for fifty years 
of fruitful service, gave him the consciousness 
of invincible security in the presence of the 
foe. 

So felt Toplady, the author of ** Rock of 
Ages." "It is my dying avowal," he said, 
near his end, " that these great and glorious 
truths, which the Lord in rich mercy has 
given me to believe, and enabled me to preach, 
are now brought into practical and heartfelt 
experience. Sickness is no affliction, pain no 
curse, death itself no dissolution. O what 
delight ; who can fathom the joys of the third 
heaven? What a bright sunshine has spread 
around me. I have not words to express it. 
I know it cannot be long now till my Savior 
will come for me; for surely no mortal man 

309 



The Reason of Suffering 

can live, after the glories that God has mani- 
fested to my soul. All is light, light, light, 
the brightness of his own glory. O come, 
Lord Jesus, come; come quickly! " 

Such is the power of the life hid with 
Christ in God. There is no other power that 
can vanquish the last enemy. Nothing else 
is of value in the trying hour. 

Wealth is no help. ** Wherefore should 
I die being so rich," groaned out Cardinal 
Beaufort upon his death-couch. " If the whole 
realm would save my life, I am able either 
by policy to get it, or by wealth to buy it. 
Will not death be bribed? Will money do 
nothing? " And with the echo of the word 
'* nothing,*' so expressive of the truth, his 
spirit took its everlastmg flight. 

Earthly power avails nothing. King Louis 
XI was filled with such craven fear that he 
forbade death to be mentioned to him even 
in his last sickness. The exclamation of 
Queen Elizabeth, " The half of my kingdom 
for an hour of time!" has passed into history. 
They had met a mightier monarch than 
themselves and their power availed not. 

Secular knowledge gives no advantage. 
Hobbes, the erudite author of the ** Levia- 
than," was a learned man ; and he exclaimed 
** I am taking a fearful leap in the dark! " 
And so was William Pope, the skeptic, a 

310 



Death 

learned man ; but he groaned out, " My 
damnation is sealed! " 

Genius is powerless. Voltaire was esteemed 
the first of his age; and in the last hour he 
exclaimed, ** I must die abandoned of God 
and men." 

Philosophy fails like the snow on deep 
waters beneath the foot of the unwary 
traveller. Newport was a philosopher; but 
his arguments failed him; "What argu- 
ment," he exclaimed, ** is there against mat- 
ters of fact? Whence this war in my heart? 
Wretch that I am, whither shall I fiee from 
this breast? That there is a God, I know, 
because I continually feel the effects of His 
wrath ; that there is a hell I am equally cer- 
tain, having an earnest of my inheritance 
there already in my breast. O that I was to 
lie upon the fire that never is quenched a 
thousand years, to purchase the favor of 
God, and be reunited to Him again! But it 
is a fruitless wish. Millions of millions of 
years will bring me no nearer to the end of 
my torments than one poor hour. O eter- 
nity, eternity! Who can discover the abyss 
of eternity ! Who can paraphrase upon these 
words, forever and ever! " 

Paul's dungeon at Rome, damp and dark, 
was not a desirable place in itself ; but grace 
made it a Bethel and this was his testimony: 

311 



/ 



The Reason of Suffering 

" I am now ready to be offered, and the 
time of my departure is at hand. I have 
fought a good fight, I have finished my 
course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth 
there is laid up for me a crown of righteous- 
ness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall 
give me at that day ; and not to me only but 
to all them who love his appearing." A con- 
trast here, worthy of thought; "Let me 
die the death of the righteous; let my last 
end be like his! " 



312 



XIX 
FUTURE REWARDS 

There is reason to think that many mis- 
apprehend the teaching of Scripture as to 
the nature of future rewards. Because heaven 
is spoken of as a place of rest they form a 
conception of a condition of inactivity, or 
mere passive enjoyment. 

Heaven is indeed a place of rest ; but rest 
is not necessarily inaction. On the con- 
trary, inaction, if long indulged, soon ceases 
to be rest. It soon becomes wearisome. An 
entire day of enforced quiet would be to 
many a man a more irksome experience than 
a day of ordinary toil. We have all often 
experienced a grateful sense of refreshing 
when enforced quiet has given place to 
activity. Action after quiet is as truly rest 
as quiet after action. Indeed the truest con- 
ception of rest is not that of quiet at all, but 
of action to which there is no clog. This is 
the highest, worthiest form of rest. 

The young of all animals delight in action 
simply for its own sake; they frisk and play 
as a matter of choice, so long as their energies 
are unspent. It is only when weariness puts 

313 



The Reason of Suffering 

a clog in the way of their sport that they 
relapse into quiet. This is emphatically true 
of the child. He loves not rest in the sense of 
quiet. He loves action. The hours of sleep 
he counts lost time. He quits with infinite 
reluctance the ball and the hoop to obey 
the signal for retirement. He abhors the 
chimney corner. Laziness was never the in- 
vention of the child. Could his body be 
strengthened to meet the soul's wants, that 
is, could the clog which the weakness of the 
physical part puts in the way of the soul's 
activity be removed, he would now and here 
furnish an example of what John saw in 
heaven when he exclaimed as if in amaze- 
ment, '* They rest not day and night! " 

A further illustration of this principle is 
met when we look at the higher intellectual 
powers. Their rest is not in inaction; they 
are never inactive; but in action from which 
the clogs are removed. 

The boy learning to read tires because of 
the difficulties in his way. The hard words 
and unaccustomed thoughts are so many 
hindrances in the mind's way, and after a 
little he lays down the book to let his thoughts 
course off into some smoother path. But 
when these difficulties are removed; when 
advancing knowledge has removed the clogs, 
he will pore over a history or a romance with 

314 



Future Rewards 

no limit of time so far as his purely mental 
faculties are concerned. 

A girl, in her first music lesson, quickly 
tires. The notes on the page, and the keys 
of the piano, are all so many clogs in her way. 
She wants to make music as the bird makes 
it, in the play of an unconstrained, spon- 
taneous impulse. The time will come when 
possibly she will do so. When mastery of her 
instrument has removed the clogs ; when her 
eye scans the notes and her hands sweep the 
keys with the ease of a Rubinstein, her soul 
will seem to float upon the waves of the har- 
mony, nor think of growing weary. 

Thus we choose not quiet for its own sake ; 
our joy is in action; and just so far as the 
clogs are removed we rest in it. 

When the Scriptures tell us that the in- 
habitants of heaven rest, and yet that they 
rest not, there is no contradiction, for free, 
unconstrained, unhindered action is the high- 
est form of rest ; and we are bound in reason 
to suppose that the redeemed at last will 
enter into it ; and we begin to see that future 
rewards are not of such a nature as to ex- 
clude service. 

We must also consider the meaning of 
the disciplinary character of the present life. 

We are now learners, pupils in the school 
of experience. Our efforts to do good are 

315 



The Reason op Suffering 

crude, feeble, full of errors and mistakes which 
almost render them void of effect. Our work 
is the work of apprentices, not of skilled 
journeymen. We seem to be not so much 
serving as learning to serve, during the short 
term of our existence. 

All feel this, and none more so than those 
whom God has seemed to honor by giving 
them a prominent part in the work now going 
on. The most successful servants of God 
have been ready to acknowledge that they 
were but tyros in the work, seemingly but 
just getting ready to accomplish something 
at the moment they were laid aside. 

"Oh! that I had known this twenty 
years ago ! ' ' exclaimed Payson, near the close 
of his life. He had received new light in 
regard to the possibilities of the Christian 
life. By his life experience he had climbed to 
a position where he saw clearly the mistakes 
of the past and the possibilities of the future, 
and felt that could he live his life over again 
with his present knowledge he could do some- 
thing worthy of a man in his Master's vine- 
yard. He felt now that he had only been at 
school and was but just beginning to be 
ready for service. 

Now is it probable that Payson 's service 
ended just when he had become efficient in it ? 
Is it probable that the like is true of the whole 

316 



Future Rewards 

body of God's people? That just as they 
emerge from a state of discipHne and train- 
ing, and begin to possess some fitness to serve, 
the opportunity for service should forever 
come to an end? 

You send your daughter to a musical 
institute; at much cost of time, money and 
effort, she masters the rudiments and finishes 
the course prescribed. Is it probable that you 
intend, or ever have intended, that from this 
moment the piano should be unused and all 
musical practice finally abandoned? 

You send your boy to academy and col- 
lege. He turns his attention to legal studies. 
He masters them ; and after years of applica- 
tion graduates with high honors from a law 
school. Is it to be supposed that you wish, 
or will permit that now he should cease 
altogether to use the knowledge he has ac- 
quired, and never plead a case? 

When we see men getting things ready for 
a certain use, we conclude that they mean 
to put them to that use. To lay the founda- 
tions of a building is to announce the purpose 
to put up the walls and finish the super- 
structure. To make tools fitted for a certain 
work is good evidence of an intention to put 
them to that work. 

Go to our national armory at Springfield, 
Mass., and watch those hundreds of work- 

317 



The Reason of Suffering 

men as they fashion the rough bars of un- 
wrought iron into swords and guns. There 
are numberless processes. There are castings, 
and mouldings, and temperings, and polish- 
ings ; and the ingenuity and toil of a thousand 
men are exhausted upon a single perfected 
weapon. Who now could be made to believe 
that after all this preparation, that polished 
armor is simply to be hung up on the walls of 
the armory and never put to use? 

But such a scene might heaven present 
if there were an end of service. The 
servants of Christ who have toiled here, and 
by toiling developed and perfected the graces 
and powers by which success is achieved, are 
the polished weapons in the armory of God. 
Who can believe that at the moment when 
they are ready for use, they will be hung up, 
as it were, upon the walls of the heavenly 
city no more to be used? 

We cannot in reason suppose it, and Christ 
has given us a different view.* '*Well done, 
thou good and faithful servant," is the 
believer's reception on high ; '' thou hast been 
faithful over a few things ; I will make thee 
ruler over many things." " I will enlarge and 
exalt thy sphere of action and promote thee 
to more efficient service." 

This view throws light upon the discipline 

*Matt. 25:21. 

318 



Future Rewards 

of life. It relieves our sadness in view of the 
shortness of time, and the fact that most of 
us with our best efforts are but just getting 
ready for service when summoned hence. 
The man who seems to be cut down in the 
midst of his usefulness is only promoted. The 
" broken shaft " is not really broken. The 
mountain swathed in mist is not cut asunder, 
though it may seem so to the casual eye. 
Above the clouds the summit still rises into 
the serene light of the upper sky. The use- 
fulness that seems to be interrupted is really 
continued. The faithful servant is welcomed 
to the higher service for which he is fitted. 

It cannot escape us that this is by far the 
worthiest conception of the rewards of the 
future. 

The noblest reward for service rendered is 
a call to a higher post. So men judge in 
earthly affairs. It is only the lower forms of 
service that can be compensated by mere 
money and dismissal from toil. When a man 
has rendered some conspicuous public service 
he expects promotion, and he values it beyond 
wealth or ease. 

When Grant had won Donelson and so 
proved himself capable of managing a small 
army what was his reward? A call to a 
higher post. He was given the command of 
a larger force, acting on a broader theater 

319 



The Reason of Suffering 

with enlarged opportunities of promoting the 
welfare of his country; and so it was his to 
lead the vast host which triumphed at Shiloh. 
After this came the glory of Vicksburg ; then 
came the call to Chattanooga ; and last of all 
a final promotion to command the combined 
armies of the Republic. 

And so in God's kingdom, we judge that 
a man whose fidelity in spiritual things has 
made him successful in a small field deserves 
a call to a larger field. It is his due, and his 
noblest reward, and not seldom we see it 
strikingly bestowed. 

It was thus that Anselm was called from 
a cloister to the head of the English establish- 
ment. 

It was thus that Wayland advanced from 
post to post till he stood at the head of the 
educators of his day as president of Brown 
University. 

Mr. Moody began his work with three 
Irish boys in a deserted hovel. But he was 
faithful over the few things, and the hovel 
became a respectable apartment; the three 
Irish boys a flourishing Sunday school. Faith- 
ful here, he soon had a congregation and a 
church, and Farwell hall was open to receive 
him. Thus from post to post of increasing 
usefulness God in His providence led him, 
till the great meeting in Europe and the main 

320 



Future Rewards 

cities of this country marked him as fore- 
most among the laborers of his class. 

Who does not see that in this God hon- 
ored him, and gave to him the noblest of 
all earthly rewards? No other could com- 
pare with it. No joy that is possible on earth 
could equal that experienced by the servant 
of God in finding his opportunity and power 
of doing good enlarging with his efforts. 

That the same principle is to bear sway in 
the future we might be assured even by the 
intimation contained in the words, ** Enter 
thou into the joy of thy Lord." ** The joy of 
the Lord, ' ' what is it ? It is the joy of achieve- 
ment, of victory over evil, of bestowing the 
blessings of eternal salvation upon the perish- 
ing. It is the joy described in the Gospel 
when we are told that " there is joy in the 
presence of the angels of God over one 
sinner that repents"; and that the shepherd, 
finding the lost sheep, " lays it on his shoulder 
rejoicing " ; and that, reaching home, he calls 
on all to rejoice with him, because the lost is 
found. 

" The Lord of life with glory crowned, 
On heaven's exalted throne^ 
Remembers them for whom on earth 

He heaved the dying groan. 
His glory now no tongue of man, 
Or seraph bright can tell; 

321 



The Reason of Suffering 

Yet 'tis the chief of all his joys 
That souls are saved from hell." 

Such is the glimpse of the joy of heaven 
given us in Scripture. It is the reward not 
of an indolent enjoyment or a useless inac- 
tion, but the infinitely higher and nobler 
reward of an exalted activity in an enlarged 
and ennobled service. 

Thus it accords with the promise of Christ 
that his disciples shall sit with him in his 
throne, share his crown, have power over the 
nations and reign as kings and priests in his 
kingdom. 

The subject is full of incitement to present 
fidelity. It shows us the pearly gates barred 
against the slothful, not merely by an ar- 
bitrary mandate of God, but by a general 
law and fixed principle of His government. 
Only they who serve God here can enter, 
because they only have become capable of 
entering upon the employment of heaven 
and of feeling its joy. 

The earnest, successful student will some 
day, if he desires it, be promoted to the post 
of the teacher. But no such promotion is 
possible to the indolent, unsuccessful pupil. 
He cannot be a teacher. He has not the 
capability. He has not the mastery of those 
branches which must be taught. Unfaithful 
in the period of training and preparation, he 

322 



Future Rewards 

has failed to develop the faculties which must 
be exercised in the teacher's vocation, and 
now he can no more take and fill such a post, 
though permission were given, than a man 
could walk without feet, or a bird could fly 
without wings. Equally impossible is it 
that he that serves not God here can enter at 
once into the joy of the heavenly courts. 

But the subject is full of encouragement 
to the sincere soul. God knows our frame. 
He pities our weakness. He remembers that 
we are dust. He understands well that we are 
merely learners now, and can do but imperfect 
work. It is only over a few things that we 
are set. If we honestly endeavor to do the 
humble duties now at hand, the gates of 
power and of bliss will open to us by and by. 

We need to think much of the heaven that 
is accessible through Christ. But in order to 
reach it we must not despise the day of small 
things, but serve diligently in our lot and 
place here, and thus get prepared, in our- 
selves, for the nobler services and sublimer 
joys of the great hereafter. 



323 



XX 

THE FIRST EASTER 

Dark was the night on Judah's plains 

Before the resurrection mom, 
For keen must be the travailing pains 

Before the highest hopes are bom ; 
And hope had fled when ruthless foes 

Had nailed the Master to the wood, 
And grief his followers' hearts had chilled, 

As fast before them flowed his blood. 

They laid him at the set of sun 

A pallid form in Joseph's tomb, 
And deemed his whole career was run, 

And naught but grief to them should come ; 
But most to Cephas, standing near — 

There pierced him, like a two-edged sword. 
The memory of his craven fear 

And false denial of his Lord. 
Oh ! could he have but one short hour 

To weep, confess and pardon seek ! 
In vain ! that kind heart beats no more. 

And death forbids those lips to speak. 

And he, the most beloved one. 

Who on Christ's bosom leaned his head. 

And hung his Lord's discourse upon, 
Still hungering though divinely fed 

Whose thoughts on eagle's wings had soared 
And all the mighty future scanned, 

And viewed the kingdom of his Lord 

324 



The First Easter 

Established over sea and land — 
Oh, who, of all the sons of men 

Such bitterness of heart could know 
As bowed his anguished spirit, when 

He saw such hopes sublime laid low? 

Oh, night of weeping, night of woe ! 

The gloomiest night since stars were bom; 
When all earth's noblest souls bowed low, 

Nor thought to hail a brighter morn. 
For what were day-dawns now to them 

But mockery since their Lord was slain? 
The past seemed as a troubled dream, 

And all to come a dream as vain. 
Afflicted souls ! for all ye grieve, 

A world with none to help or save ; 
Seal but that tomb beyond reprieve, 

And heaven is falsehood, earth a grave. 

But who are they who toward the tomb 

Move sadly o'er the dewy road. 
Wrapped in the morning's lingering gloom 

Ere yet the day-star looks abroad? 
No Man is there, 'tis woman's heart 

That draws them on this fateful mom, 
And gives to them the immortal part 

To hail, the first, heaven's glorious dawn. 

They four have stood on Calvary's height 

And seen the martyred prophet die, 
While earth quaked in the dying light, 

And boding thunders shook the sky. 
One owns two apostolic sons, 

And " sons of thunder " are their names; 
And one is Chuza's wife, and one's 

The mother of the lesser James. 

325 



The Reason of Suffering 

Where are their sons, their spouses where, 

On this eventful glorious day? 
Stunned by the logic of despair 

In dull indifference they stay. 
Too many ways their reasonings turn ! 

Bend hither, all the world, your eyes ; 
Once on the ages' summit learn 

That love is wiser than the wise. 

But who is she with footsteps fleet, 

The fourth, with pensive brow but fair. 
Who once with tears bedewed Christ's feet 

And wiped them with her flowing hair? 
Once she was wrecked and demon-torn, 

The buffet and the scorn of men ; 
One word of grace he spoke, and born 

Anew was she — the Magdalen. 

Thus on they fare, with measure large 

Of spices mixed and chosen well, 
The last dear office to discharge. 

Which hand could do or heart impel. 
But yet they own one rising fear 

Which breaks with speech the silence lone, 
When they shall reach the sepulchre 

Who then shall roll away the stone? 

Swift as the thought flies up to God 

So swift an angel strong descends ; 
The guards fall prostrate on the sod 

As flaming o'er the rock he bends, 
And rolls it back with sudden sound, 

A seat, from which his fiery gaze 
Sends tremors through the quaking ground 

And fills the gloom with lightning rays ; 

326 



The First Easter 

Then enters ; oh, what there befell 

Let seraphs standing by the throne 
With tongues of flame essay to tell, 

A mystery all to us unknown, 
But fraught with glories brighter far 

Than when the first creative word 
Bestud the heavens with star on star 

That moved obedient to their Lord ! 
O wondrous thought, that earth should be 

The chosen place for deeds divine, 
Which all the deeds that angels see 

In earth or heaven far outshine ; 
When sin, and death, sin's minion dread, 

Once and forever were o'erthrown. 
And Christ, who seemed in weakness dead, 

The mighty, living Christ was shown ; 
Who rose with nail-print in his hands. 

And spear-rent in his wounded side, 
And snapped the grave's relentless bands, 

And life's fair portals opened wide ; 
Through which shall pass forevermore 

The happy subjects of his grace, 
Myriads on myriads, moving o'er 

That highway free to all the race. 

And wondrous that the signal bell 

That marked the hour for such a deed, 
Which angels are the first to tell 

Ere back to heaven they quickly speed, 
Was struck, not by an angel's hand 

Of those who circle round the throne, 
But by their sigh who faltered and 

Said, ** Who shall roll away the stone? ** 

O, ye, who love the Lord indeed, 
While others coldly turn away, 

327 



The Reason op Suffering 

And ready stand his cause to plead, 

But fear some hindrance in the way '— 
Some rock of opposition strong, 

Too strong for your weak faith to move, 
And troubled much and baffled long 

No further trial dare to prove — 
Press onward ; dare the deed designed, 

As they dared on their dubious way ; 
And e'en as they did, you shall find 

The stone already rolled away ! 

And so they found it ; but surprise 

Their faith o'ercame ; the angel's deed, 
Boding all joy, seemed to their eyes 

A sign in which they could but read 
The tale of brutal theft, a blow 

To crush their bleeding hearts anew, 
Denied the boon e'en mourners know 

To pay the dead the honors due. 
How often, on ourselves intent, 

The boon we most devoutly sought, 
Fills us with fear — divinely sent — 

But in ways other than we thought ! 

Thus Mary feared, and left behind 

Her three companions wondering there. 
All tremulous of heart to find 

Some stronger souls her grief to share. 
And found them e'er she far had gone ; — 

Cephas still brooding o'er his fall, 
And with him the beloved John, 

And with choked utterance told them all ; 
Who starting as from slumber deep, 

Swiftly the oft-trod path retrace ; 
But not till those three left to weep 

Have entered in and seen the place 

328 



The First Easter 

Where the Lord lay ; and see beside 

A radiant angel form appear, 
Whose words their terror gently chide 

And say, ** He is risen, he is not here." 
This form they saw, this voice they heard, 

With fear and mighty joy, all three, 
And ran to bring the others word ; 

But him they loved they did not see. 

The two apostles, drawing near. 

Survey the tomb with anxious eye ; 
To them no signs of theft appear ; 

All things in order they descry. 
But Peter's soul is dull with pain. 

His inner vision clouded o'er; 
He turns him to his home again 

With grief and doubt still burdened sore. 

But John, the faithful and the true, 

Who quailed not in the judgment hall, 
But showed what mighty love can do 

To stay the soul from every fall ; 
Now shows what mighty love can do 

To make the inner vision clear 
To penetrate with piercing view 

Where seeming darkest clouds appear. 
One look at that well-ordered place 

And truth sublime flashed on his view ; 
Of work divine he saw the trace, 

And fear and doubt no longer knew. 
He saw, believed, and filled with peace, 

Triumphant joy his spirit proved ; 
He knew death's captive had release ; 

But yet he saw not him he loved. 



329 



The Reason of Suffering 

But weeping Mary stoops to view 

The inner tomb in mute despair ; 
And lo ! two angels, plainly two, 

A double glory flashing there ! 
O blessed ministry of grief 

That veils the earth but clears the skies, 
And by its purging, sharp and brief, 

Unveils fresh glories to our eyes ! 
No angel form was seen by John 

With all his seer-like vision true ; 
The three companions saw but one ; 

But weeping Mary saw the two. 

Saw and withdrew ; no glorious sight 

Could charm her if her Lord were gone ; 
And heaven itself were plunged in night 

Could she not gaze his face upon. 
A voice rose near her, soft and kind, 

" Woman, why weepest thou? " it said, 
*' Whom seekest thou? " With weeping blind 

She, thinking only of the dead, 
Where he might be implored to know. 

If in some other tomb he lay. 
That she in loneliness might go 

And o'er his still face weep and pray. 

*' Mary ! " the voice replied — no more — 

That one word trembles on the air, 
More potent than a thousand score 

To break the spell of dark despair. 
She starts as not when angels spoke ; 

The tone, the accent well she knew 
The spell of dark despair they broke 

And thrilled her being through and through. 
" Master ! " she cries — one word for one — 

And all the deeps within her moved , 

330 



The First Easter 

Swift swoons of joy her senses drown, 
And Mary saw him whom she loved ! 

O ye who seek abiding peace 

And lasting blessedness to win, 
And crave, with anguished prayers, surcease 

Of loneliness and gloom within ; 
Seek him whom Mary sought, and prize 

No other glories ; give no heed 
To tempting voice from earth or skies, 

And you shall see the Lord indeed. 

Whom next that day did Jesus greet? 

The three who trusted what they heard 
From angel lips, nor stayed their feet 

But went to bring the others word ; 
And Jesus met them in the way ; 

" All hail ! " he cries, " Be not afraid " ; 
And straight instructs them what to say 

When they are to his " brethren " sped. 

Hast thou had comfort from above, 

Light to illuminate thy soul, 
A gift of grace, a pledge of love. 

Making thy wounded spirit whole? 
Go tell thy brother, do not stay ; 

But share with him the gift divine. 
And Christ shall meet thee in the way 

And add his message unto thine. 

And next to Cephas, wondrous tale. 
The Lord appeared with beaming face; 

Veiled is the scene, for words must fail 
To paint that hour of grief and grace. 

But when remorse thy spirit thralls 
Sorrow and shame commingled rise, 

331 



The Reason of Suffering 

And hot tears o'er remembered falls 

Drop down from both thy weeping eyes, 

Yield not to fear and dark despair, 

Where need is there the Christ will be ; 

This depth hath grace divine, and where 
The Lord found Peter he'll find thee. 

Two more disciples weary, worn, 

And almost hopeless in the grief 
By which their bleeding hearts are torn, 

Turn their feet homeward for relief. 
A third appears, they know him not ; 

But strange attraction draws them on 
To tell him all their deepest thought, 

And how their dearest hopes are gone, 
And lo ! he speaketh wondrous words, 

The while their hearts within them bum, 
And strikes their spirits' deepest chords. 

As back their thoughts he bids them turn 
To prophecies declared of old 

That Christ must die but rise again, 
And all those hidden stores unfold. 

Nor think such words divine are vain. 
But when, to fair Emmaus come, 

They gently urge him to abide 
And share with them a transient home, 

He yields, and seated by their side 
Takes bread and blesses, breaks and gives, 

As often he had done before ; 
Enough ! they know him, know he lives, 

And joy is theirs forevermore ! 

Doubt not, when prayers spontaneous rise 

Like holy incense in thy heart. 
And truths divine thy soul surprise. 

Beaming fresh light from every part — 

332 



The First Easter 

Doubt not that then the Lord is by ; 

These are the kindlings of his power; 
Then own him, welcome, bid him nigh, 

And feast with him one sacred hour. 

But ere the night shades drawing on 

Close in upon that day of days, 
One glory more its acts shall crown 

And fill the measure of its praise. 
Gathered in wonder and in awe 

His chosen ones together wait ; 
" And will he come whom Simon saw 

And those outside the city gate? " 
Scarce has the question circled round 

When sudden tremors shake the room, 
And rising as if from the ground 

They see a bright form swiftly come, 
And hear a voice say, ** Peace ! " and see 

Two hands stretched out and nail-prints there, 
And side spear-rent ; " 'Tis he ! 'Tis he ! " 

And glad Hosannas fill the air. 
Oh, what an hour was that ! how sweet 

To look on him whom they adore ; 
And that which makes their joy complete, 

To know he lives forevermore. 
He lives, and they through him shall live. 

Live to proclaim afar his love. 
Live their own lives for him to give, 

And then forever live above. 

What price could pay for hour like this, 
Worth countless hours such joys without? 

And yet one missed it, wrapped in his 
Own shroud of weak distrust and doubt. 

O. never make thine own short view 
The measure of the grace divine; 

333 



The Reason of Suffering 

Another soul may see for you 

What else were hid from eye of thine. 

Had Thomas this plain maxim known 
He had attained a brighter fame, 

And of him it had ne'er been shown, 
" He was not there when Jesus came." 

So closed the day, but other days 

Were by that glorious presence blest; 
Twoscore in all he trod the ways 

Of men, before came heaven and rest. 
Once James he saw and girded well 

To meet proud Herod's futile wrath, 
The wonders of his grace to tell, 

And tread the martyrs' glorious path. 
And Thomas too was not forgot 

But shown the wished-for hands and feet 
Tom by the spikes, each bloody spot, 

Which made the witness chain complete. 

And by Gennesaret's fair lake 

By miracle revealed he stood. 
And thrice pledged Peter for his sake 

To feed his flock as few else could ; 
And once upon a mountain's height ; 

Where, gathered by his own command. 
Five hundred souls, touched by the light 

That ne'er was seen on sea or land, 
Beheld him, as he said, appear, 

And heard with awe the solemn word 
That they should speed forth far and near, 

And preach the gospel of their Lord. 

Once more, on Bethany he walked. 

Far from the city's jostling crowd. 
And while with chosen ones he talked 

334 



The First Easter 

Glory embathed him like a cloud ; 
And as he rose above their sight, — 

They gazing with an inward pain, — 
An angel's voice fell from the height, 

" Why gaze ye? He shall come again! " 
These truths together fitly join, 

The one without the other vain ; 
That he who rose in power divine 

And lives shall therefore come again. 

Saul saw him on Damascus' road 

Outshining far the Syrian sun. 
Heard words which such compassion showed 

That the hard Pharisee was won. 
Changed was he, changed was e'en his name, 

All former loves he counted vain, 
And then proclaimed with tongue of flame 

" He rose, he lives, he comes again ! " 

John saw him on the sea-girt isle 

Where tyrant hate had cast him lone, 
And in prophetic trance the while 

Beheld him on the sapphire throne ; 
And saw his eyes as lamps of fire ; 

His face all dazzling as the sun ; 
His voice as if heaven's myriad choir 

Joined all their notes and spoke as one. 

This glorious sight the apostle saw, 
While thrilled his blood in every vein. 

And cried, " The world shall stand in awe 
Before him, for he comes again ! " 

Then did the risen Son of Man 

And Son of God with power divine, 
Unfold to John the ages' plan 

335 



The Reason of Suffering 

And make the unknown future shine ; 
And that mysterious, mighty scroll 

Of Zion's toil and warfare sore, 
With hand of might and grace unroll, 

Till time shall end and be no more. 
Then bade him sound from shore to shore, 

" All opposition shall prove vain; 
I died, rose, live forevermore, 

And quickly do I come again! " 

Oh, swiftly have the ages fled ; 

A thousand years are as a day , 
And saints have wept and martyrs bled, 

As years have chased the years away. 
But not one mighty soul has stood 

In arms upon the battle plain, 
And checked the foe's incoming flood, 

But felt " He lives and comes again 1 '* 

The age grows old ; triumphant wrong 

Stripped of its mask stands full disclosed ; 
Embittered, stung with shame, yet strong. 

Vows vengance dire on all opposed, 
While truckling half-hearts grasp its hand. 

And softly modulate their tone, 
With shrewd excuse inactive stand, 

And make that deadly cause their own. 
O ye few true-hearts ! sad for you, 

Were there no succor ye could gain, 
Alone you would be quenched as tow, 

Your hope is, ** He shall come again !'* 

Then sound it out this Easter mom 

The risen Lord has tarried long, 
But yet he leaves us not forlorn ; 

" He comes !" — this crowns our Easter song, 

336 



The First Easter 

He comes to raise up righteousness, 

And, justice fallen in the street; 
He comes the weak and poor to bless, 

And raise the fallen to their feet. 
He comes to raise death's captives up, 

He comes to take his purchased throne, 
He comes to raise earth's buried hope, 

And wear his resurrection crown. 
He comes the usurper self to slay 

And give to love the imperial seat. 
To bring earth's resurrection day, 

And make his people's joy complete. 

Yes, ring it out this Easter mom 

From earth to heaven the glad refrain ; 

For this were all the ages bom — 

Christ died, rose, lives and comes again! 



337 



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